1. WHG

a) I searched for a few different places in WHG and found the results to be pretty much what I expected, but there were a couple of interesting things which emerged for me. First, I searched for my home town, “Beaver Dam, WI” and no results were returned. When I searched for just “Beaver Dam,” 63 results emerged including 3 that relate to my town. All of the results were in the United States, including one in Alaska. It hadn’t been in the forefront of my mind that that would be the case, but of course that is true. It was also fun to see the density of dots correspond to places where one is likely to find beavers (or would have been likely to find beavers at one point in time).

I next searched more specifically for the rural township of approximately 1400 people where my family now lives, “Westford.” 8 results were returned, all in the Eastern United States and none corresponding to the town in Wisconsin.

I then switched gears and searched for “Rome” which returned 67 results with just 3 in Italy. I thought I would try to look more broadly for “Lazio” the region of Italy in which Rome resides, and the region did not appear. However, when I searched for “Tuscany,” another region, it does appear. It seemed an interesting discrepancy.

b) I wasn’t able to create a dataset to practice contributing data. Instead, I got an error message:

2. Recogito

b) I uploaded an article by Fabio Barry on marble floors in the early Modern Mediterranean. When I converted into text format, it was much longer than I expected, so I only annotated a few pages of it and found the process quite tedious. I also realized after I had gone through and annotated all place names in those pages, that I needed to be more selective when doing so because including countries actually just diffused the information.

In all, I found the mapping not particularly illuminating. It seemed to reveal an obvious premodern Mediterranean world and to present this world with a certain stasis that doesn’t really speak to the ideas of mobility and exchange of materials in the article. Perhaps, if I continued to annotate the document, it would begin to reveal interesting connections which don’t yet jump out!

Hello All,

I was unable to figure out the process for uploading data (even the sample data) to the World Historical Gazetteer site. This is due to human error and ignorance on my part, and I look forward to learning more about how to successfully do it. Because of the error messages I received I was unable to browse the contents of the data or practice reconciling them in the system.

I had more success with Recogito.

For my research, I am reading scanned pdfs of newspapers written for and by gay people from the 1970/80s in Brazil during the military dictatorship. I am interested in the “letters to the editor” section of the newspaper in which readers wrote into the editors expressing their compliments, contempt, or concerns for the newspaper. Unfortunately, Recogito does not accept pdfs as a file type to upload. I first tried to convert the pdf to a txt file, but the result was a useless mess of letters and special characters. Instead, I created my own dataset in Excel. I recorded the Issue Number, Title (of the letter), the Name provided, and the Location(s) listed.

In all, I recorded over 150 submissions, resulting in more than 46 unique locations. Some letter-writers identified only their city, others provided both city and state, while yet others named their neighborhood as their location. I kept the original location indicators as specified by the writers in the sources because how people define where they are from speaks to their identities. For example, many letter-writers were from Rio de Janeiro (the city), some were from other cities within the state of Rio de Janeiro (Belfort Roxo, RJ, for example), and others identified the neighborhood (Copacabana) within the city of Rio de Janeiro. Certain neighborhoods ascribe socioeconomic, lifestyle, and political affiliations, and it is important to catch such information in the mapping and gazetteer-ing process.

I converted the Excel to a CVS and successfully uploaded it to Recogito. It seems that due to my data being in the form of a table, Recogito will only allow me to select rows in their entirety, and not specific words or the text itself. Although I am able to assign more then one place, person, or event to the row, I am not able to distinguish between the three categories within a single row.

While playing around with both World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito, I came across the same issue – scope. As mentioned above, several Letters to the Editor identify their place as a neighborhood, beach, or university. Neither the WHG nor Recogito were able to capture this information. Considering how human experiences and historical happenstances define a “place,” it is important that mapping programs reflect how people identify their places. In times of oppression, people may choose to identify themselves with specific, confined, and inconspicuous places (theaters, back alleys, or bars). Neighborhoods, I argue, take on important social meanings and facilitate community identity. How have other historians/anthropologists mapped specific neighborhoods and other important yet clandestine places? I will have to contend with this as I move forward with my research.

With Recogito, I uploaded a text document pertaining to the removal of cherry blossom trees to make way for the Thomas Jefferson memorial in Washington D.C. I wanted to mark on the Gazeteer where the shipments of cherry blossoms were originally planted, the location for the site of the Jefferson memorial, and where many of the trees were moved to after the construction of the Jefferson memorial. This was a seamless task and the recogito interface with the gazeteer map worked fluidly and intuitively. One question I had, and I am not sure if it is technologically feasible, but would the system eventually be able to accept PDF files? I had originally uploaded one to be consequently rejected due to the file type. I am not sure if uploading PDF files is possible in the future, but it would greatly expand what I am able to upload and annotate.

I unfortunately struggled to get the gazeteer to cooperate with my files. I received an error notification. I believe this is largely due to my misunderstanding of document types and upload criterion. However, I played around with the Gazeteer without my own personal files and was impressed with the relative ease of access and amount of data currently in the system. A lake from my hometown of ten thousand was marked with a brief description. This was very exciting to see. Like my colleagues, I would love the zoom in feature to be expanded upon. This would enable scholars working on micro-level projects (streets, alleyways) to utilize the program. However, if a board is to be constructed to review submissions, expanding the scope of the program to the street level would be difficult to administer and adjudicate.

World Historical Gazetteer

For this portion of the assignment, I chose to look at Saint Petersburg, as I know it refers to a place in both Florida and Russia. When I searched this term, I was not surprised to see dots appear in these two places on the map, but it was interesting to see the other places that are referenced by this word pairing.  

Along with Florida and Russia, “Saint Petersburg” references locations in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota. Of the seven returned results, Florida is the only space with more than one result. containing the variants “Saint Petersburg,” “Saint Petersburg Beach,” and “Port of Saint Petersburg.”

Apart from the various locations of Saint Petersburgs globally, I wanted to look at this particular city due to its change in name in Russia over time. When I clicked on the returned result in Russia, there were five different attestations: “Saint Petersburg,” “Sankt-Peterburg,” “Leningrad,” “Petrograd,” and “St Petersburg.” “Sankt-Peterburg” is the transliteration of the Russian name for the city (Санкт-Петербург), while “Leningrad” and “Petrograd” refer to  names given to the city in the twentieth century. “Grad” [град] is the Old Slavic term for “gorod” [город], meaning “city,” so both “Leningrad” and “Petrograd” refer to Lenin’s city and Peter’s (Peter the Great) city, respectively. Saint Petersburg was renamed Petrograd following the first World War, then renamed to Leningrad following Lenin’s death in 1924. Seeing that Санкт-Петербург appeared as a listed variant to “Saint Petersburg,” I then searched the city’s name in Cyrillic. Unsurprisingly, the only returned result was in Russia, as opposed to the seven results returned with the English search term of the city name.

Overall, I found the interface easy to use and interesting; however, the one question that I have relates to the numbers that appear over each green dot in the “temporal attestations” view. I’m unsure as to what these numbers refer to, and there isn’t a link on the numbers, as is present on other reference numbers that appear throughout the interface.

Recogito 

Originally, I wanted to look at a Russian text in the original language, so I used an excerpt of Dostoevsky’s The Double [Двойник] to test whether that would be possible. When tagging the protagonist’s name (Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin [Яков Петрович Голядкин]), the interface recognized that there was another appearance of the term, tagging it as a name as well. However, there was another occurrence of the name that was not recognized: the last name in the genitive case (Golyadkina [Голядкина]). I’m unsure of exactly how the technology works, but it does seem that patterns are matched through an exact match of character strings, as opposed to through coreference resolution, where terms that are different in spelling, yet reference the same entity (such as a character’s name/nickname, etc.), are able to be recognized. I also wondered whether each tag that is made has some way of telling whether it is a repeatable reference to a singular entity: does each occurrence of “Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin” that is tagged as a name internally recognize that it is referencing the same named entity (maybe through id number)? Because of the cases, I decided to look at a Russian text in English, as place names can also change through cases. For example, the sentence “I live in Saint Petersburg” would be “Я живу в Санкт-Петербурге” with the name of the city in the prepositional case, differing from the nominative form of the city, Санкт-Петербург. In place-dense texts, this would present problems as characters move to and from cities, as well as attribute things to cities, changing the case of the word. I wanted to make sure that cities that differ only in case are not recognized as distinct entities: this problem isn’t present in English, so I went with that instead.

For the sake of tagging repeatable place names that can be recognized as such through consistency of spelling, I looked at Tolstoy’s War & Peace [Война и Мир], which is a fictional account of the lives of three central families during the time of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815). I chose this novel in particular due to its long passages describing battles/battlefields, as well as movement of forces across space and place. For the tagging, I looked at a chapter describing the events following the Battle of Borodino, tagging the names of people and places.

I then looked at the “Summary” pie chart, which stated that there where 38 annotations: 14 people and 24 places. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of this information: which places are referenced the most, as well as people? This also relates to my question about ids for the tags: are repeated references recognized as distinct or as related to the same named entity? In the document, there are 6 distinct place names, which occur a total of 24 times. There is a distinction to be made between 24 place occurrences and 24 places; I would be interested to see a count of the occurrence of each distinct place, separate from the more general “places that have been counted in the document” view. However, I think that this is an interesting tool that is well-designed and accessible, although I want to know more about the underlying technology.

I feel a little bit out of my depth with these weeks since I have very little background working with maps or gazetteers and the work I do in general isn’t super interested in the idea of place or space in the way maps and gazetteers are. However, our discussion of information systems and how to organize information in discoverable ways is of great interest to me. The unique problems of mapping with the cultural, historical, and geographical concerns that arise are certainly helpful ways for me to see how information systems can be ever-so-complicated.

After registering for the WHG, I was able to upload the sample data from the tutorial, but had a hard time playing around with it. I imagine this was my own lack of understanding regarding what kind of files these are. I also played around with inserting specific pieces of data into the tool, but didn’t know enough about labeling them to feel like I was doing it super correctly. Even as someone very new to this, I can see how researchers would be able to use this tool, though, to “locate” their work “placialy.” 

When exploring the tool at large, it did feel like it was pretty eurocentric. I tried to search for Seattle, but wasn’t able to explore a whole lot with what was in the current version.  I can imagine folks wanting to do research about the Asian population there around WWII, for instance, and that could be a really cool dataset to include in future iterations. The euro-centricity was discussed in class last time, and I know the data set is expanding, so I wasn’t surprised by my findings. It is really engaging to look at different cities and the links in data that you can find.

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When exploring Recogito I uploaded a text version of one of my favorite novels, Eowyn Ivy’s Snow Child, which takes place primarily in Alaska, but also in the Eastern United STates and has characters from Eastern Europe. I felt a lot more adept at using this tool since I was working with a primary text file and could label people, places, and events. I could see how this would be a really interesting way to “map” texts and visualize them interactively. I have a background in literature and I can imagine research questions this tool would help with. 

Also, as someone who has used grounded theory to code texts before, I really liked how streamlined Recogito’s tool was. It was clean and easy to use. It made the coding process less confusing. 

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Reflecting on my experience with the WHG and Recogito, I’m reminded of a strain from the reading where they talk about Google maps, and other “involuntary” citizen contributions that seem “crowdsourced” but are really just using loads of data to make the applications run. When we are working with these research tools–WHG and Recogito–our contributions are voluntary and for our own benefit as researchers. However, the implication of large scale maps like Google maps which rely on data from users to predict traffic patterns, for instance, is both very convenient, and very scary.

From the reading:

“Services such as Flickr; tweets, blogs, and other forms of citizen-contributed text can be georeferenced, and the tracks of individuals through space and time can be captured and uploaded in numerous ways. These last may be instances of involuntary citizen contributions, since the individual may or may not be aware of the tracking. While many services are careful to allow their users to opt out of being tracked or of having their locations captured in other ways, there are many exceptions. A vehicle equipped with an automated toll payment system, for example, is logged every time it passes through a toll-gate, and such records have apparently been subject to subpoena in litigation, as evidence of an individual’s location in space and time.”

Naming Places Ch 2

How do we conceive of space and place when we are being tracked? How does our spacial awareness change when we cannot “hide” or “get off the grid”? How does that change the landscapes of our lives?

1. World Historical Gazetteer

For this task, I chose to search for “London,” because I thought that this place name would generate results drawn from several of the World Historical Gazetteer’s datasets and results that refer to physical spaces other than London, England.

“London” generated 90 search results, with the first result, “London (inhabited places) [GB],” referring to what could be described as the physical space of London, England.

This result has four attestations drawn from three datasets (geonames cities (500), Getty TGN (partial), and DK Atlas of World History), and the attestations varyingly classify London as a populated place, inhabited place, city, and settlement—which I thought would be the case, given the temporal span of “London” (or “Londinium”) as a place.

I was also interested in the geographic span of “London,” in the sense that this place name or variations of it might refer to physical spaces other than London, England, given our readings and our discussion of gazetteers as providing data about the past through historical places linked by name and temporal and spatial relationships.

This image (above) shows the geographic span of search results for “London,” with a more opaque circle indicating London, England’s physical space and a dense cluster of circles representing instances of “London” as a place name in the United States and the Caribbean.

I was interested here in the map’s visualization of search results reflecting colonial relationships, as seen in the cluster of results in the northeastern part of the United States and in Little London, a community in Jamaica. The map also visualizes what might be thought of as aspirational relationships, in the sense that America, to some extent, modeled itself as a group of colonies and as a young nation on Britain (and France), which might be reflected in place names.

2. Recogito

For this task, I selected a group of four short texts from 1927–1928 from my current research on Washington National Cathedral. Each of the texts are concerned with establishing a relationship between the cathedral and the “Old World” through various materials brought to the cathedral.

As a tool, Recogito was most useful for me in that annotating texts highlights places and people of interest and visualizes how frequently they are mentioned in the text. With the group of texts I selected, at least, it seems that annotating would require a human user with some familiarity with the text and the people and places to which it refers. In addition to instances in which places and people are named specifically, there are instances in which phrases and terms are used to refer to previously identified locations and individuals: “the devoted monastic brother,” the “Little Garden,” the “Cathedral,” etc. The person creating the annotations would need to be familiar with the people and places mentioned in the text, or at least be able to make educated inferences, in order to annotate such references.

In our readings, our discussion of gazetteers, and our tasks with the World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito, I was interested particularly in notions of space and place, in which “space” refers to a coordinate location or spatial situation and “place” refers to a site of human, historical experience. These concepts relate to my research interests and my current work on the use of material to establish connections between “there” and “here” and “past” and “present,” and the subjective use and interpretation of these ways of understanding the world in spatial, or “platial,” and temporal terms.

I’m looking forward to reading other students’ blog posts and to our discussion on Tuesday, in which I would be interested to talk about to what extent the World Historical Gazetteer and Recogito as visualization tools enable us, as individual researchers and in our fields, to think about our material in different ways.