798 research outputs found

    Mapping Ethnophysiographies: An Investigation of Toponyms and Land Cover of Missoula County, Montana

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    This thesis investigates the ethnophysiography of Missoula County, Montana via place names. Toponyms and landscape have been observed to have a relationship that can be studied through many lenses. Ethnophysiography, the study of how language and landscape relate to each other via human conceptualization, is a lens that was applied to this thesis because it recognizes the embodied information that toponyms carry and investigates landscape accordingly. Thus, the following research seeks to understand if ethnophysiographic diversity exists between toponyms in the Salish and English languages of Missoula County, Montana by analyzing place names and land cover in GIS and analyzing the data for a Zipfian distribution. I research, collect, and analyze the secondary information available on Missoula County names and land covers in order to empirically examine this ethnophysiographic relationship

    Unlocking Environmental Narratives

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    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

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    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

    Get PDF
    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

    Automatic reconstruction of itineraries from descriptive texts

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    Esta tesis se inscribe dentro del marco del proyecto PERDIDO donde los objetivos son la extracción y reconstrucción de itinerarios a partir de documentos textuales. Este trabajo se ha realizado en colaboración entre el laboratorio LIUPPA de l' Université de Pau et des Pays de l' Adour (France), el grupo de Sistemas de Información Avanzados (IAAA) de la Universidad de Zaragoza y el laboratorio COGIT de l' IGN (France). El objetivo de esta tesis es concebir un sistema automático que permita extraer, a partir de guías de viaje o descripciones de itinerarios, los desplazamientos, además de representarlos sobre un mapa. Se propone una aproximación para la representación automática de itinerarios descritos en lenguaje natural. Nuestra propuesta se divide en dos tareas principales. La primera pretende identificar y extraer de los textos describiendo itinerarios información como entidades espaciales y expresiones de desplazamiento o percepción. El objetivo de la segunda tarea es la reconstrucción del itinerario. Nuestra propuesta combina información local extraída gracias al procesamiento del lenguaje natural con datos extraídos de fuentes geográficas externas (por ejemplo, gazetteers). La etapa de anotación de informaciones espaciales se realiza mediante una aproximación que combina el etiquetado morfo-sintáctico y los patrones léxico-sintácticos (cascada de transductores) con el fin de anotar entidades nombradas espaciales y expresiones de desplazamiento y percepción. Una primera contribución a la primera tarea es la desambiguación de topónimos, que es un problema todavía mal resuelto dentro del reconocimiento de entidades nombradas (Named Entity Recognition - NER) y esencial en la recuperación de información geográfica. Se plantea un algoritmo no supervisado de georreferenciación basado en una técnica de clustering capaz de proponer una solución para desambiguar los topónimos los topónimos encontrados en recursos geográficos externos, y al mismo tiempo, la localización de topónimos no referenciados. Se propone un modelo de grafo genérico para la reconstrucción automática de itinerarios, donde cada nodo representa un lugar y cada arista representa un camino enlazando dos lugares. La originalidad de nuestro modelo es que además de tener en cuenta los elementos habituales (caminos y puntos del recorrido), permite representar otros elementos involucrados en la descripción de un itinerario, como por ejemplo los puntos de referencia visual. Se calcula de un árbol de recubrimiento mínimo a partir de un grafo ponderado para obtener automáticamente un itinerario bajo la forma de un grafo. Cada arista del grafo inicial se pondera mediante un método de análisis multicriterio que combina criterios cualitativos y cuantitativos. El valor de estos criterios se determina a partir de informaciones extraídas del texto e informaciones provenientes de recursos geográficos externos. Por ejemplo, se combinan las informaciones generadas por el procesamiento del lenguaje natural como las relaciones espaciales describiendo una orientación (ej: dirigirse hacia el sur) con las coordenadas geográficas de lugares encontrados dentro de los recursos para determinar el valor del criterio ``relación espacial''. Además, a partir de la definición del concepto de itinerario y de las informaciones utilizadas en la lengua para describir un itinerario, se ha modelado un lenguaje de anotación de información espacial adaptado a la descripción de desplazamientos, apoyándonos en las recomendaciones del consorcio TEI (Text Encoding and Interchange). Finalmente, se ha implementado y evaluado las diferentes etapas de nuestra aproximación sobre un corpus multilingüe de descripciones de senderos y excursiones (francés, español, italiano)

    Communicating with Culture: How Humans and Machines Detect Narrative Elements

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    To understand how people communicate, we must understand how they leverage shared stories and all the knowledge, information, and associations contained within those stories. I examine three classes of narrative elements that convey a wealth of cultural knowledge: Propp\u27s morphology, motifs, and discourse structure. Propp\u27s morphology communicates how roles and actions drive a narrative forward; motifs fill those roles and actions with specific, remarkable events; discourse groups these into a coherent structure to convey a point. My thesis has three aims: first, to demonstrate that people can reliably detect and identify all three of these narrative elements; second, to develop automatic detectors for discourse and motifs; third, to demonstrate the deep relation between these narrative elements and other theories of narrative structure and knowledge representation that I refer to as the \textit{continuum of communication}. The first step of my work answers two key questions about Propp\u27s morphology by demonstrating the reliability of annotators applying Propp\u27s scheme across a variety of experiments, in a double-blind annotation study. Additionally, I demonstrate a shortcoming in Propp\u27s scheme, demonstrating areas in which there are elements present in the folktales he analyzed that are not part of his morphology. The second step of my work, showing that people familiar with motifs can reliably detect when they are being used to share information and associations, approaches this problem by performing a large-scale annotation study of 21,000 examples into four categories performed by three pairs of annotators over a period of 11 weeks. I show that, in a double-blind annotation study, people familiar with the motifs had a moderate to high degree of agreement, demonstrating the reliability of humans at this task. The third step demonstrates the reliability of applying a theory of news discourse structure to news articles via a double-blind annotation study and, using the results of this annotation, demonstrate a preliminary detector of the news discourse function of paragraphs in news articles. The fourth step of my work, detecting motific usage automatically, consists of a large-scale pipeline that achieves moderate performance. This pipeline is the first work towards automatically detecting motific usage of motifs and beats out simple baselines while comparing favorably too and generalizing better than a simple neural network baseline system. Additionally, the pipeline uses explainable features that can be used in future work to further develop our understanding of how humans automatically detect motifs. Finally, I describe an exploration of the broader scope of narrative elements that communicate information between individuals who share a cultural or sub-cultural background. This work is based off of a small-scale, in-lab annotation of posts from the “incel” subculture, a niche internet community with extremist elements and, at times, disturbing content. This small annotation has revealed a complex landscape encompassing fourteen categories, more than three times the number of elements as the large-scale annotation, many of which resemble the moving parts of other theories on narrative structure and cognition, including Vladimir Propp\u27s morphology of folktales and Silvan Tomkins\u27 script theory. I describe these relations and provide a rough continuum of the landscape of narrative communication

    Automatic Extraction and Assessment of Entities from the Web

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    The search for information about entities, such as people or movies, plays an increasingly important role on the Web. This information is still scattered across many Web pages, making it more time consuming for a user to find all relevant information about an entity. This thesis describes techniques to extract entities and information about these entities from the Web, such as facts, opinions, questions and answers, interactive multimedia objects, and events. The findings of this thesis are that it is possible to create a large knowledge base automatically using a manually-crafted ontology. The precision of the extracted information was found to be between 75–90 % (facts and entities respectively) after using assessment algorithms. The algorithms from this thesis can be used to create such a knowledge base, which can be used in various research fields, such as question answering, named entity recognition, and information retrieval

    A systematic literature review of historic garden management and its economic aspects

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    Historic gardens are important parts of humanity’s built heritage within the designed landscape, providing many environmental, economic and socio‐cultural benefits. Management is a key part of their conservation, perhaps the most difficult because it is costly, must be continual, and requires a skilled workforce. This systematic review looks at the literature addressing historic garden management, with special attention regarding the social, economic and environmental aspects of sustainability. Academic studies on this subject come from many different disciplines, making it both stimulating and fragmented. It is now time to consolidate these interdisciplinary efforts into a clear vision, including a framework of key themes and research methods so as to better coordinate efforts and make the information and innovation generated more accessible to the garden managers “in the trenches”. With this aim, reviewed studies are classified according to 10 criteria: supply or demand orientation; management phase involved; primary sustainability processes addressed; geographic criteria; number of sites covered; policy documents referred to; kind of data collected; study methods employed; possibility of bias specifically regarding historic gardens; garden use. An analysis of these criteria shows that historic garden management literature focuses on describing the gardens themselves, with few studies interested in the people supporting them. Future research should follow recent policy documents’ lead and pay more attention to community value and involvement
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