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  • Murrieta-etal-feb2014

    Rights statement: This is the accepted version of the following article: Murrieta-Flores P., Baron A., Gregory I., Hardie A. and Rayson P. (2015) “Automatically analysing large texts in a GIS environment: The Registrar General’s reports and cholera in the nineteenth century” Transactions in GIS, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tgis.12106/abstract. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.

    Accepted author manuscript, 1.61 MB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

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Automatically analysing large texts in a GIS environment: the Registrar General’s reports and cholera in the nineteenth century

Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>04/2015
<mark>Journal</mark>Transactions in GIS
Issue number2
Volume19
Number of pages25
Pages (from-to)296-320
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date14/11/14
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present new research showcasing how Geographic Information Systems in combination with Natural Language Processing and Corpus Linguistics methods can offer innovative venues of research to analyze large textual collections in the Humanities, particularly in historical research. Using as examples parts of the collection of the Registrar General's Reports that contain more than 200,000 pages of descriptions, census data and vital statistics for the UK, we introduce newly developed automated textual tools and well known spatial analyses used in combination to investigate a case study of the references made to cholera and other diseases in these historical sources, and their relationship to place-names during Victorian times. The integration of such techniques has allowed us to explore, in an automatic way, this historical source containing millions of words, to examine the geographies depicted in it, and to identify textual and geographic patterns in the corpus.

Bibliographic note

This is the accepted version of the following article: Murrieta-Flores P., Baron A., Gregory I., Hardie A. and Rayson P. (2015) “Automatically analysing large texts in a GIS environment: The Registrar General’s reports and cholera in the nineteenth century” Transactions in GIS, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tgis.12106/abstract. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.