An automated approach for geocoding tabular itineraries

Historical itineraries, often accessible as lists or tables describing places visited in sequence, are abundant resources and also important objects of study for humanities scholars. This article advances a novel method for automatically geocoding tabular itineraries, combining approximate string matching with a cost optimization algorithm based on dynamic programming. Experiments with a dataset of historical itineraries, with ground-truth geocoding annotations provided by domain experts and leveraging also the GeoNames gazetteer, attest to the effectiveness of the proposed method. The obtained results show that while approximate string matching can already achieve very low median errors, with many toponyms matching exactly against GeoNames entries, the combination with cost optimization can significantly improve results in terms of the average distance towards the correct disambiguations

GeoLocSI – Web-Based GIS for Verification and Modification of Data Stored in Data Base

Currently there are thousand container events happening daily on more than 20 000 locations in the World. Some of these locations are big international ports and others are just little cities with not precise coordinates in the free available Data Bases (DB). Verification and validation these locations are at the same time a very important task and a challenging one. This paper describes the development of a web-based geographical information system for assisting in verifying and modifying geographical data in DB by interactive intuitive GIS technique. For the proper work of the system, first we collected geographical data for container ports from different open sources according to the known container ports’ names from our ConTraffic System. Then we stored it in a dataset in our DB and we created a map-based application which allows us to see not only the data in tabular view but also the geographical position of the ports over a map. Using this web-based application all the data can be modified quite easy, including the geographical coordinates. They can be modified directly by just typing the correct coordinates or by interactive way (drag the graphical object to the correct geographical position on the map).JRC.G.4-Maritime affair

Geospatial Analysis and Modeling of Textual Descriptions of Pre-modern Geography

Textual descriptions of pre-modern geography offer a different view of classical geography. The descriptions have been produced when none of the modern geographical concepts and tools were available. In this dissertation, we study pre-modern geography by primarily finding the existing structures of the descriptions and different cases of geographical data. We first explain four major geographical cases in pre-modern Arabic sources: gazetteer, administrative hierarchies, routes, and toponyms associated with people. Focusing on hierarchical divisions and routes, we offer approaches for manual annotation of administrative hierarchies and route sections as well as a semi-automated toponyms annotation. The latter starts with a fuzzy search of toponyms from an authority list and applies two different extrapolation models to infer true or false values, based on the context, for disambiguating the automatically annotated toponyms. Having the annotated data, we introduce mathematical models to shape and visualize regions based on the description of administrative hierarchies. Moreover, we offer models for comparing hierarchical divisions and route networks from different sources. We also suggest approaches to approximate geographical coordinates for places that do not have geographical coordinates - we call them unknown places - which is a major issue in visualization of pre-modern places on map. The final chapter of the dissertation introduces the new version of al-Ṯurayyā, a gazetteer and a spatial model of the classical Islamic world using georeferenced data of a pre-modern atlas with more than 2, 000 toponyms and routes. It offers search, path finding, and flood network functionalities as well as visualizations of regions using one of the models that we describe for regions. However the gazetteer is designed using the classical Islamic world data, the spatial model and features can be used for similarly prepared datasets.:1 Introduction 1 2 Related Work 8 2.1 GIS 8 2.2 NLP, Georeferencing, Geoparsing, Annotation 10 2.3 Gazetteer 15 2.4 Modeling 17 3 Classical Geographical Cases 20 3.1 Gazetteer 21 3.2 Routes and Travelogues 22 3.3 Administrative Hierarchy 24 3.4 Geographical Aspects of Biographical Data 25 4 Annotation and Extraction 27 4.1 Annotation 29 4.1.1 Manual Annotation of Geographical Texts 29 4.1.1.1 Administrative Hierarchy 30 4.1.1.2 Routes and Travelogues 32 4.1.2 Semi-Automatic Toponym Annotation 34 4.1.2.1 The Annotation Process 35 4.1.2.2 Extrapolation Models 37 4.1.2.2.1 Frequency of Toponymic N-grams 37 4.1.2.2.2 Co-occurrence Frequencies 38 4.1.2.2.3 A Supervised ML Approach 40 4.1.2.3 Summary 45 4.2 Data Extraction and Structures 45 4.2.1 Administrative Hierarchy 45 4.2.2 Routes and Distances 49 5 Modeling Geographical Data 51 5.1 Mathematical Models for Administrative Hierarchies 52 5.1.1 Sample Data 53 5.1.2 Quadtree 56 5.1.3 Voronoi Diagram 58 5.1.4 Voronoi Clippings 62 5.1.4.1 Convex Hull 62 5.1.4.2 Concave Hull 63 5.1.5 Convex Hulls 65 5.1.6 Concave Hulls 67 5.1.7 Route Network 69 5.1.8 Summary of Models for Administrative Hierarchy 69 5.2 Comparison Models 71 5.2.1 Hierarchical Data 71 5.2.1.1 Test Data 73 5.2.2 Route Networks 76 5.2.2.1 Post-processing 81 5.2.2.2 Applications 82 5.3 Unknown Places 84 6 Al-Ṯurayyā 89 6.1 Introducing al-Ṯurayyā 90 6.2 Gazetteer 90 6.3 Spatial Model 91 6.3.1 Provinces and Administrative Divisions 93 6.3.2 Pathfinding and Itineraries 93 6.3.3 Flood Network 96 6.3.4 Path Alignment Tool 97 6.3.5 Data Structure 99 6.3.5.1 Places 100 6.3.5.2 Routes and Distances 100 7 Conclusions and Further Work 10

A GIS based multi-modal multiple optimal path transit advanced traveler information system

A method for the design and use of a Transit Advanced Traveler Information System (TATIS) using an off-the-shelf Geographic Information System (GIS) is developed in this thesis. The research design included: 1) representing multi-modal transit networks in a digital form with schedule databases; 2) development of a multiple optimal path algorithm that takes into account walking transfers using published time schedules; 3) incorporating user preferences and penalties in the algorithm; 4) development of a user-interface with suitable output capabilities; 5) using the prototype for sample inquiries giving performance measures. This prototype was developed using the Arc/Info GIS developed by ESRI, Inc. The principal results of the research demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of the TATIS prototype with respect to the five previously mentioned issues. Areas of future improvement and research focus on performance measures and added functionality

Unlocking Environmental Narratives

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities

Unlocking environmental narratives: towards understanding human environment interactions through computational text analysis

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities

Unlocking Environmental Narratives

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities

A Digital Periegesis: Implementing Spatial Research Infrastructures for Classical History and Archaeology

Over the past ten years the spatial turn in the humanities in Scandinavia has resulted in a growing number of infrastructural projects aimed at facilitating interdisciplinary research into spatial aspects of a rich variety of materials, place-names, early modern inventories and cadastral maps, medieval literature and art, as well as Viking-Age and medieval runic inscriptions, to name just a few. This intensive development has brought about a number of challenges, as these projects differ with regard to their agendas, setups, and customized approaches to data, theories, and methods. This volume provides the research community with an opportunity to revisit traditional research questions in the context of new infrastructural environments. Although primarily aimed at medievalists and scholars of the early modern period, the volume offers a broader spatial and temporal scope with a contribution from classical studies. The classics have in many ways pioneered the application of digital methods to narrative spatial analysis and developed strong collaborative engagement with infrastructure, producing Pelagios, an ever-growing platform for a plethora of spatial databases and gazetteers, as well as Recogito, a digital annotation tool. These two successful examples show a pressing need for community building around SRIs for early modern and medieval Scandinavia to ensure sustainable design, long-term preservation, and further collaborative developmen