Porter, Catherine and Atkinson, Paul and Gregory, Ian (2015) Combining statistics and texts using GIS : nineteenth century health reports. In: GISRUK 2015 Conference Proceedings :. UNSPECIFIED, GBR, pp. 492-499.
Abstract
This paper combines Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to explore how statistics and textual information may be compared. Combined with known mortality figures, for the first time, this research provides a spatial picture of the relationship between the Registrar-General’s discussion of disease and deaths in England and Wales during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A variety of techniques are employed to provide a new view on whether government published texts were directly related to changing mortality patterns during this time.