Customising geoparsing and georeferencing for historical texts

• Main Authors: Rupp, C. J., Rayson, Paul, Baron, Alistair, Donaldson, Christopher, Gregory, Ian, Hardie, Andrew, Murrieta-Flores, Patricia
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Data mining; Geographic information systems; Gold; Historical Corpora; Lakes; Optical character recognition software; Pragmatics; Text mining; Toponym Resolution
• DOI: 10.1109/BigData.2013.6691671

In order to better support the text mining of historical texts, we propose a combination of complementary techniques from Geographical Information Systems, computational and corpus linguistics. In previous work, we have described this as `visual gisting' to extract important themes from text and locate those themes on a map representing geographical information contained in the text. Here, we describe the steps that were found necessary to apply standard analysis and resolution tools to identify place names in a specific corpus of historical texts. This task is seen as an initial and prerequisite step for further analysis and comparison by combining the information we extract from a corpus with information from other sources, including other text corpora. The process is intended to support close reading of historical texts on a much larger scale by highlighting using exploratory and data-driven approaches which parts of the corpus warrant further close analysis. Our case study presented here is from a corpus of Lake District travel literature. We discuss the customisations that we have to make to existing tools to extract placename information and visualise it on a map.