TopoText: Interactive Digital Mapping of Literary Text (original) (raw)

Customising Geoparsing and Georeferencing for Historical Texts

2013 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, 2013

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.

From Space to Place: Place-based Explorations of Text.

New data sources, for example in the form of geotagged image libraries and digitised archives of historical text documents, provide us with new opportunities for exploring how place is described. Using a framework derived from work in human geography and information science, we illustrate how there is more to place than names and coordinates. Through a set of case studies we explore different aspects of the seemingly trivial query ‘mountains in the Alps’ addressing a range of issues including ambiguity, the use of vernacular names, ways in which concepts such as mountain are used in different locations and by different groups, approaches to automatically generating macro-maps in space and time and, finally, techniques allowing regions to be characterised and compared based on the terms used to describe them. The use of all these methods in combination allows us to come closer to a meaningful representation of place in the sense of human geography within the context of Geographic Information Science. However, our approaches focus on the naming of places and their material or perceivable properties, and there is still much work to do to properly represent place, and particularly sense of place. Nonetheless, we suggest that such approaches have considerable potential for those working in the digital humanities, and especially those concerned with contributing to a spatial turn therein.

Enhanced Conceptual Model for Spatial References in Works of Fiction: Mapping Vilnius Literature

The Cartographic Journal, 2019

This paper presents a data model developed during the project of mapping the literature of Vilnius, capital of Lithuania. The city has for centuries been an important place for Lithuanian, Polish, Jewish and Russian culture. Various literary texts reflect different spatial conceptualizations. The diversity of spatial references in the literature of Vilnius calls for a comprehensive literary database that would store the different types of spatial references: locations, zones, routes, spatial links and events, related both to literary spaces and to authors' biographies. For this purpose, a data model proposed by previous researchers has been modified and enhanced. A Web GIS application was designed for the input of geographic data. The elaborated conceptual model is not limited to Vilnius literature. It can readily be applied to any work of fiction or biography depending on the academic interests of the researcher.

Geographical information recognition and visualization in texts written in various languages

Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Applied computing - SAC '04, 2004

In this paper, we describe a system that recognises place names in natural language text and produces geographic maps and animations showing the geographical coverage of texts about a certain subject as it changes over time. As the system is built to analyse texts in many different languages, it restricts the usage of linguistic analysis tools to the minimum. Instead, it relies on a gazetteer containing place names in different languages and uses heuristics for disambiguation purposes.

Chronotopic Cartography: Mapping Literary Time-Space

Journal of Victorian Culture

This short methods paper emerges out of the AHRC-funded ‘Chronotopic Cartographies’ project for the digital mapping of place and space as represented in works of literature. The primary aim of that project was to find a way of mapping and visualizing represented literary worlds for which there is no corresponding real ‘ground’. A solution was found in the form of topological graphs which allow for relative rather than absolute mapping (but also permit a relative imaginary map to be lain on top of a pre-existing cartesian form). Using a spatial schema to chunk out the text in terms of chronotopic (time-space) zones enables the generation of a series of visualizations that show different kinds of spatio-temporal constructions in texts. The visualizations are centred upon nodes that consist of chronotopes (e.g. ‘the road’) as well as locations (e.g. ‘road to Geneva’); connections between them of different kinds and toporefs within them (references to other places from this one). The pa...

Geospatial discovery in collections of written text

When you travel around the world and you search for potential hotels to stay at, the search engine that you use most likely first asks you about your destination, only later continuing to other travel details such as arrival and departure dates. Even before those latter questions are answered, you are presented with hotel options, and you get very fast accustomed to comparing your options on a map. The map thus becomes at tools for geospatial discovery. A different situation is encountered when you want to read books from around the world. Unlike the tourism business, libraries have not yet implemented geospatial discovery. In this article, we describe and discuss a first geospatial discovery tool for textual data. Our tool reads and interprets textual data, maps it, and helps you find your books on the map. If you search books about, say, a particular area of Seattle, our tool helps you find books in which famous buildings, institutions, and inhabitants have been mentioned that hav...

Interactive Text Mining Suite: Data Visualization for Literary Studies

In recent years, there has been growing interest in visualization methods for literary text analysis. While text mining and visualization tools have evolved into mainstream research methods in many fields (e.g. social sciences , machine learning), their application to literary studies still remains infrequent. In addition to technological challenges, the use of these tools requires a methodological shift from traditional close reading to distant reading approaches. This transition also aligns digital humanities with corpus linguistics, which still "remains obscure" and not fully embraced by digital humanists. To address some of these challenges, we introduce Interactive Text Mining Suite, a user-friendly toolkit developed both for digital humanists and corpus linguists. We further demonstrate that the integration of visual analytics and corpus linguistics methods helps unveil language patterns , otherwise hidden from a human eye. Making use of both linguistically annotated data and natural language processing techniques, we are able to discern patterns of part-of-speech uses in Medieval Occitan manuscript Romance de Flamenca and its English translation. Furthermore, visual analysis not only detects stylistic differences at a word level, but also at sentential and document levels. While preserving traditional close reading techniques, this toolkit makes it possible to apply an interactive control over documents, thus allowing for a "synthesis of computational and humanistic modes of inquiry".

Annotation of toponyms in TEI digital literary editions and linking to the web of data

Matlit, 2016

This 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 mark-up, 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.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830\_4-2\_3

Georeferencing works of literature

2010

A pilot web application for collaborative georeferencing of Slovenian works of literature was developed. Problems in georeferencing in general and georeferencing works of literature are discussed. The pilot system can be a model for establishing web sites for georeferencing literature for different languages. The application is based on Google Maps and implemented using PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. The intended users of the system are mainly lovers of literature, travelers and pupils.