McDonough, Katherine (2019) Toponym disambiguation in historical documents using network analysis of qualitative relationships. In: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, GeoHumanities 2019. UNSPECIFIED, 3:1-3:4. ISBN 9781450369602
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
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.