Speaker: Mariona Coll Ardanuy, Federico Nanni, Kaspar Beelen and Luke Hare
Affiliation: 1, The Alan Turing Institute, British Library, London, United Kingdom; 2, PRHLT Research Center, Universitat Politècnica de València, València, Spain; 3, Digital Humanities Research Hub, School of Advanced Study, Senate House, London, United Kingdom
Title: The Past is a Foreign Place: Improving Toponym Linking for Historical Newspapers
Abstract: In this paper, we examine the application of toponym linking to digitised historical newspapers. These collections constitute the largest trove of historical text data available to researchers in the humanities. They contain varied, fine-grained information about the past, anchored in a specific place and time. Place names (or toponyms) are common entry points for starting exploring these collections. In this paper, we introduce a new tool for toponym linking and resolution, T-Res , a modular, flexible, and open-source pipeline, which is built on top of robust state-of-the-art approaches. We present a comprehensive step-by-step examination of this task in English, and conclude with a case study in which we show how toponym linking enables historical research in the digitised press.
