• Linking early geospatial documents, one place at a time: annotation of geographic documents with Recogito

    Author(s):
    Elton Barker (see profile) , Pau de Soto Cañamares, Leif Isaksen, Rainer Simon (see profile)
    Date:
    2015
    Group(s):
    Ancient Greece & Rome, Digital Humanists
    Subject(s):
    Cultural geography, Data curation, Digital humanities, Historical geography
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    cultural history, digital editing, literary geography, Digital curation, Digital history
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6J906
    Abstract:
    Recogito is an open source tool for the semi-automatic annotation of place references in maps and texts. It was developed as part of the Pelagios 3 research project, which aims to build up a comprehensive directory of places referred to in early maps and geographic writing predating the year 1492. Pelagios 3 focuses specifically on sources from the Classical Latin, Greek and Byzantine periods; on Mappae Mundi and narrative texts from the European Medieval period; on Late Medieval Portolans; and on maps and texts from the early Islamic and early Chinese traditions. Since the start of the project in September 2013, the team has harvested more than 120,000 toponyms, manually verifying almost 60,000 of them. A number of benefits arise out of this work: on the one hand, the digital identification of places – and the names used for them – makes the documents' contents amenable to information retrieval technology, i.e. documents become more easily search- and discoverable to users than through conventional metadata-based search alone. On the other hand, the documents are opened up to new forms of re-use. For example, it becomes possible to “map” and compare the narrative of texts, and the contents of maps with modern day tools like Web maps and GIS; or to analyze and contrast documents’ geographic properties, toponymy and spatial relationships. Seen in a wider context, we argue that initiatives such as ours contribute to the growing ecosystem of the “Graph of Humanities Data” that is gathering pace in the Digital Humanities (linking data about people, places, events, canonical references, etc.), which has the potential to open up new avenues for computational and quantitative research in a variety of fields including History, Geography, Archaeology, Classics, Genealogy and Modern Languages.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. Date:
    2015
    Journal:
    e-Perimetron
    Volume:
    10
    Issue:
    2
    Page Range:
    49 - 59
    ISSN:
    1790-3769
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    6 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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