Submitted manuscript
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
Publication date | 5/11/2019 |
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Host publication | Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, GeoHumanities 2019 |
Editors | Bruno Martins, Ludovic Moncla, Patricia Murrieta-Flores |
Pages | 3:1-3:4 |
Number of pages | 4 |
ISBN (electronic) | 9781450369602 |
<mark>Original language</mark> | English |
In this paper we use network analysis to identify qualitative “neighbors” for toponyms in an eighteenth-century French encyclopedia, but could apply to any entry-based text with annotated toponyms. This method draws on relations in a corpus of articles, which improves disambiguation at a later stage with an external resource. We suggest the network as an alternative to geospatial representation, a useful proxy when no historical gazetteer exists for the source material’s period. Our first experiments have shown that this approach goes beyond a simple text analysis and is able to find relations between toponyms that are not co-occurring in the same documents. Network relations are also usefully compared with disambiguated toponyms to evaluate geographical coverage, and the ways that geographical discourse is expressed, in historical texts.