LocLinkVis: A Geographic Information Retrieval-Based System for Large-Scale Exploratory Search

In this paper we present LocLinkVis (Locate-Link-Visualize); a system which supports exploratory information access to a document collection based on geo-referencing and visualization. It uses a gazetteer which contains representations of places ranging from countries to buildings, and that is used to recognize toponyms, disambiguate them into places, and to visualize the resulting spatial footprints.Comment: SEM'1

Annotation of Toponyms in TEI Digital Literary Editions and Linking to the Web of Data

International audienceThis paper aims to discuss the challenges and benefits of the annotation of place names in literary texts and literary criticism. We shall first highlight the problems of encoding spatial information in digital editions using the TEI format by means of two manual annotation experiments and the discussion of various cases. This will lead to the question of how to use existing semantic web resources to complement and enrich toponym markup , in particular to provide mentions with precise geo-referencing. Finally the automatic annotation of a large corpus will show the potential of visualizing places from texts, by illustrating an analysis of the evolution of literary life from the spatial and geographical point of view.Este artigo aborda as dificuldades e as vantagens da anotação dos nomes de lugar em textos literários e de crítica literária. Começamos por realçar os problemas de codifi-cação da informação espacial em edições digitais usando o formato TEI, através de duas experiências de anotação manual e da análise de diversos casos. Isto conduzirá à questão de como utilizar os recursos da web semântica para complementar e enrique-cer a marcação de topónimos, em particular com georreferenciação rigorosa. Por último, a anotação automática de um grande corpus irá mostrar o potencial de visuali-zação de locais a partir de textos, ilustrando a análise da evolução da vida literária segundo um ponto de vista espacial e geográfico. Palavras-chave: estudos literários digitais; topónimos; web semântica; bases de dados geográficas; mapas e visualizações

Placenames analysis in historical texts: tools, risks and side effects

International audienceThis article presents an approach combining linguistic analysis, geographic information retrieval and visualization in order to go from toponym extraction in historical texts to projection on customizable maps. The toolkit is released under an open source license, it features bootstrapping options, geocod-ing and disambiguation algorithms, as well as cartographic processing. The software setting is designed to be adaptable to various historical contexts, it can be extended by further automatically processed or user-curated gazetteers, used directly on texts or plugged-in on a larger processing pipeline. I provide an example of the issues raised by generic extraction and show the benefits of integrated knowledge-based approach, data cleaning and filtering

The theoretical, methodological and technical issues of digital folklore databases and computational folkloristics

The study examines the problems and possibilities presented by the digitization of national folklore archives and collections in the wider context of folklore archiving and digital humanities. The primary goal of the study is to present a problem-oriented and critical overview of the available digital databases containing folklore texts (WossiDiA, Sagragrunnur, ETKSpace, Danish Folklore Nexus, Nederlandse VolksverhalenBank, The Schools’ Collection, etc.), and of the analyses conducted on these using computational methods. The paper first presents a historical overview of the conceptualization that went into the creation of folklore databases (genre-centered, collector, and collection-centered approaches), followed by a discussion of the practical, technical, and theoretical aspects of digital content creation (crowdsourcing, markup languages, TEI, digital critical editions, etc.). The study then takes a look at the new digital tools and methods applied in the analysis of digitized folklore texts (text-mining, network theory methods, data visualization), and finally places databases and computational folkloristics within a larger theoretical framework

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

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

Past, present and future of historical information science

Der Bericht evaluiert Entwicklungen und Einflüsse von Forschungen im Bereich der empirisch orientierten Geschichtswissenschaft und deren rechnergestützten Methoden. Vorgestellt werden ein Forschungsparadigma und eine Forschungsinfrastruktur für die zukünftige historisch orientierte Informationswissenschaft. Die entscheidenden Anstöße dafür kommen eher von Außen, also nicht aus der scientific community der Assoziation for History and Computing (AHC). Die Gründe hierfür liegen darin, dass die AHC niemals klare Aussagen darüber gemacht hat, welches ihre Adressaten sind: Historiker, die sich für EDV interessieren, oder historisch orientierte Informationswissenschaftler. Das Ergebnis war, dass sich keine dieser Fraktionen angesprochen fühlte und kein Diskurs mit der 'traditionellen' Geschichtswissenschaft und der Informationswissenschaft zustande kam. Der Autor skizziert ein Forschungsprogramm, das diese Ambiguitäten vermeidet und die Ansätze in einer Forschungsinfrastruktur integriert. (ICAÜbers)'This report evaluates the impact of two decades of research within the framework of history and computing, and sets out a research paradigm and research infrastructure for future historical information science. It is good to see that there has been done a lot of historical information research in the past, much of it has been done, however, outside the field of history and computing, and not within a community like the Association for History and Computing. The reason is that the AHC never made a clear statement about what audience to address: historians with an interest in computing, or historical information scientists. As a result, both parties have not been accommodated, and communications with both 'traditional' history and 'information science' have not been established. A proper research program, based on new developments in information science, is proposed, along with an unambiguous scientific research infrastructure.' (author's abstract