Steiner, Erik and Frank, Zephyr and Gregory, Ian and Bodenhamer, David and Ezeani, Ignatius (2023) Spatio-Textual Regions : Extracting Sense of Place from Spatial Narratives. In: PLATIAL’23 : International Symposium on Platial Information Science 19–21 September 2023 / Dortmund, Germany. UNSPECIFIED, pp. 15-22.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Sense of place is a critical concept underlying the meanings attached to locations and locales in geography and related fields. This concept is often ambiguous and complex when presented in narrative text and challenging to represent and analyse at scale. Mapping a sense of place in this regard requires more than finding geographical coordinates or drawing polygons around toponyms. Our paper develops the concept of a spatio-textual region (STR), a method for identifying platial clusters embedded in spatial narrative texts and explores the potential for mapping the results. We demonstrate the method on an 1857 publication by Thomas Nelson & Sons, a traveller's guide to the Lake District in England. We envision that this method could be employed at scale for generating novel representations of the sense of place embedded in tourist literature, personal journeys, and other spatial narratives.