Gazetteers: Annotation and mapping

SunoikisisDC Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Session 3

Date: Thursday January 25, 2024. 16:00-17:30 GMT.

Convenors: Chiara Palladino (Furman University), Valeria Vitale (University of Sheffield)

Youtube link: https://youtu.be/0Lyqsf_BtrM

Slides: Gazetteers: Annotation and Mapping - combined slides (PDF)

Outline

This seminar explains what digital gazetteers are and the crucial role that they play in the study of the ancient world, as well as in the creation and use of digitised collections in museums and archives. We analyse and compare different historical gazetteers, including the Pleiades Gazetteer of the Ancient World and the Heritage Gazetteer of Libya. In the second part of this session, we introduce an online tool, Recogito, that leverages the rich information stored in gazetteers to generate meaningful map-based visualisations through semantic annotation of text and images.

We conclude by discussing the potential of machine learning for the automatic and semi-automatic creation of historical gazetteers from large digitised map collections, and we will present the outcomes of the Machines Reading Maps project and how they have been applied to the David Rumsey Map Collection, enabling a "search by word" function. The exercises we propose covers semantic annotation with Recogito, simple web mapping, and custom searches in the Rumsey Collection to "hunt" for obscure and forgotten place-name variations.

Required readings

• Chiara Palladino. 2016. "New Approaches to Ancient Spatial Models: Digital Humanities and Classical Geography." In Digital Approaches and the Ancient World. Edd. G. Bodard, Y. Broux & S. Tarte. BICS 59.2, 56-70. Available: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-5370.2016.12038.x/full
• Dunn, S., & Vitale, V. (2021). Linking Text and Maps: Annotation as a Critical Tool for Teaching in the Spatial Humanities. Literary Geographies 7(2), 292-310. Available: https://www.literarygeographies.net/index.php/LitGeogs/article/view/253

Further readings

• Berman, M.L., Åhlfeldt, J., & Wick, M. (2012). Historical Gazetteer System Integration: CHGIS, Regnum Francorum, and GeoNames. 2016-12-10. Available: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/53a1/9e3be077ca259e78947f6ebdba7bf7715dd2.pdf
• Berners-Lee, Tim, Linked Data, 2006. (available: https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
• Blaney, Jonathan, "Introduction to the Principles of Linked Open Data." In The Programming Historian (2017). Available: https://programminghistorian.org/lessons/intro-to-linked-data
• Jim Clifford, Josh MacFadyen, and Daniel Macfarlane, "Intro to Google Maps and Google Earth," Programming Historian 2 (2013), https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0028.
• Tom Elliott and Sean Gillies (2009). "Digital Geography and Classics." Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.1. Available: http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000031/000031.html
• Gill, T. (2004). Building semantic bridges between museums, libraries and archives: The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. First Monday 9(5). Available: https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v9i5.1145
• Randa El Khatib. 2019. "Laying the Foundation for Community-Driven, Open Cultural Gazetteers." KULA: knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation studies 3.1, pp. 21–. Available: https://kula.uvic.ca/articles/10.5334/kula.53/
• Lewis, Martin, W. "The Circassian Genocide and the Cartographic Erasure of Circassia." GeoCurrents. 2023. Available: https://www.geocurrents.info/blog/2023/04/18/the-circassian-genocide-and-the-cartographic-erasure-of-circassia/
• Palladino, C. 2023. “Not the same landscape. Rediscussing digital approaches to premodern spatial knowledge systems.” In: Palladino C. & Bodard G (eds.), Can’t Touch This. London: Ubiquity Press. Pp. 141–164. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bcv.h
• Southall, H., Mostern, R., & Berman, M.L. (2011). "On historical gazetteers." International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 5(2), 127-145. Available: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/ijhac.2011.0028
• Vitale, Valeria. “Searching Maps by Words: How Machine Learning Changes the Way We Explore Map Collections.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, vol. 8, no. 1, Apr. 2023. Available: https://culturalanalytics.org/article/74293-searching-maps-by-words-how-machine-learning-changes-the-way-we-explore-map-collections

Other Resources

• Recogito tutorial
• Recogito Youtube tutorial for beginners
• Recogito Youtube tutorial - advanced
• Text on Maps Guide
• See also previous SunoikisisDC sessions:
  • Anne Chen, Rainer Simon, Valeria Vitale Linked geographical data and web-mapping
  • Monica Berti and Gabriel Bodard, Named Entity Recognition and Prosopography
  • Elton Barker and Valeria Vitale, Annotating Geographical Data with Recogito

List of Gazetteers and other authority lists for the ancient world

• Pleiades Gazetteer
• Trismegistos
• The Pelagios Gazetteers Activity
• Manto - mythical places and people
• PeriodO - a gazetteer of time
• World Historical Gazetteer
• WikiData
• Lexicon of Greek Personal Names
• SNAP DRGN - Gazetteer of Ancient People
• al-Thurayyā gazetteer of the Classical Arabic world
• Digging into Early Colonial Mexico

Exercise

1. Google Maps tutorial

Work through the Intro to Google Maps and Google Earth tutorial from Programming Historian, and ensure that you understand the basics of including layers and data tables in maps.

2. Annotation and visualisation with Recogito

Step One: Create a free account on Recogito. Upload a text (in .txt format) or an image (in .jpg, .png., or .tiff format) that show a relevant amount of geographical information. Geo-resolve the place references against Recogito's gazetteers. Use tags to enrich your annotations, and, when appropriate, also links to external authority lists such as Wikidata. Experiment with different visualisation modes, and think of what have you learned about the original source, and how could you use your output in different contexts (for example a class, an academic publication, a conference, a museum exhibition, and so on). You can choose any resource you like, but bear in mind that Recogito's gazetteers are more focused around the ancient world. You may try annotating accounts of battles, mediaeval itineraries, archaeological accounts, as well as epigraphic corpora. Remember that you can also choose to upload a single file, or multiple in a bundle, to enable comparisons. You can also mix texts and images in your comparisons.

Step Two: Download your annotations in CSV format. Open the spreadsheet and familiarise yourself with the data you have created and how it is structured. If you have created person and/or event annotations, delete them from the spreadsheet. then, following this tutorial produce a web map. You can experiment with different visualisations, for example leveraging the tags or the place type.

3. Search the David Rumsey Map Collection by word

Step one. Create a free account on the David Rumsey Map Collection, select the "text on maps" function and experiment with the different ways of searching maps in this large collection. What new kinds of things, relevant to your research, are you able to find?

Step two. Choose an historical gazetteer that features place names transliterated into the Latin alphabet (like the Heritage Gazetteer of Libya or Pleiades). Search for a relevant place name using the basic search or adding "~1" to broaden the number of results. Are there any variants that are not recorded in the gazetteer? Where do they come from?

Step three. If you are feeling generous with your time, your could email the variant(s) you have found, plus references to the map in the Rumsey collection, to the editors of the gazetteer, or request editing rights yourself. They will be very happy to receive your contribution.