Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Once these datasets are available, the time and cost of georeferencing
any dataset that includes place-names becomes greatly reduced, opening
up the possibility of georeferencing a wide range of atribute data sources
within and beyond the humanities.
A further extension in the use of qualitative data that is also show-
ing encouraging signs is the use of texts within GIS. Unstructured texts
such as essays, books, official reports, and newspapers are the most
widely used source within the humanities. Until recently these seemed
to lie beyond the scope of GIS; however, it is becoming apparent that
techniques from corpus linguistics can be used to extract place-names
from corpora, the technical name for a large body of text, usually in
digital form. Combining these techniques to extract place-names with
the abilities of gazeteers to georeference place-names quickly and eas-
ily has the potential to allow unstructured texts to be converted into
GIS databases.
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The development of these techniques is taking place in
parallel with the increasing availability of large historical corpora as a
result of large-scale digitization projects such as Early English topics
Online, the Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, and even, potentially,
Google Books.
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Additionally, material that will be relevant to modern
historians in the near future will be “born digital,” such as, possibly, the
Wikileaks material on the Iraq War. Given this possibility, the potential
for these techniques to be applied to explore texts in entirely new ways
becomes enormous.
A further potentially useful infrastructure is the development and
availability of online historical map collections, particularly where
these are georeferenced.
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The material that these types of collections
hold is a rich source of potential research in its own right. It can also
be used as background information for more specific sources and to
help with georeferencing sources and features that may not appear in
gazeteers.
W hile all of these infrastructural developments are important, the
main question is not “what can be built?” but “what new analyses can
be done and what contributions to knowledge will they make?” We are
still in the early stages of answering this, perhaps even in understanding
how best to go about it. As large humanities databases become available,
questions still remain about how best to explore or analyze these given
