Use of the Edinburgh geoparser for georeferencing digitized historical collections

Abstract

We report on two JISC-funded projects that aimed to enrich the metadata of digitized historical collections with georeferences and other information automatically computed using geoparsing and related information extraction technologies. Understanding location is a critical part of any historical research, and the nature of the collections makes them an interesting case study for testing automated methodologies for extracting content. The two projects (GeoDigRef and Embedding GeoCrossWalk) have looked at how automatic georeferencing of resources might be useful in developing improved geographical search capacities across collections. In this paper, we describe the work that was undertaken to configure the geoparser for the collections as well as the evaluations that were performed.