Thursday, October 20, 2022

9:00 AM - 12:00 PM

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Presentation Type

Venue: Graneek Room at ANU Chifley Library

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Session Information

Location for in-person participants: Graneek Room at Australian National University Chifley Library, further details tba Cost for in-person participants: $60 (Morning tea is included) Location for virtual participants: Zoom meeting, further details tba Time is Canberra local time EADT Cost for virtual participants: $40 In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using places featured in archival material and other digitised textual resources as the basis for visualisation and spatial analysis. Natural Language Processing (NLP) software, such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), facilitates the automated identification and extraction of geographic locations from text; however, it cannot assign or resolve geographic coordinates. The process of manually identifying coordinates for individual locations can be time consuming and is impractical when working with large corpora. This workshop will introduce participants to the basic principles of geolocation, the process through which geographic coordinates are linked with place names, as well as demonstrating approaches and workflows that can assist in automating this task. Taking the classic Australian text For the Term of his Natural Life (1874) as the object of analysis, this workshop will also provide participants with a critical understanding of the affordances and limitations of these tools. This workshop will provide participants with the following skills and competencies: - The ability to identify and extract locations from text through the application of off the shelf Named Entity Recognition Software - The ability to identify the appropriate gazetteer (record of place names) for their research, and an understanding of how these records can be employed in a computational approach to automate the task of geo-location. - The ability to transform geo-located data into maps through the use of basic mapping software. - An understanding of the limitations of NER software, and the ability to recognise and understand how different approaches may impact the accuracy of the data. - A practical understanding of how this approach can be automated. An example of this workflow as applied to For the Term of his Natural Life will be made accessible to participants in the form of a freely distributed Jupyter notebook This workshop is of relevance to anyone interested in the practical and theoretical challenges of geolocating Australian historical resources, and welcomes individuals with or without programming experience. Workshop presenters: Dr Simon Musgrave, Finn Morgan and Michael Niemann