Resolving places, past and present: toponym resolution in historical British newspapers using multiple resources

Abstract

Newspapers and their metadata are richly geographical, not only in their distribution but also their content. Attending to these spatial features is a prerequisite in newspaper research. Following other projects to have geoparsed place names in newspapers, we describe our approach to linking historical geospatial information in text to real-world locations which 1) adopts an expansive definition of what counts as a locatable entity; 2) uses knowledge bases derived from contemporaneous sources; and 3) leverages contextual information to disambiguate hard-to-locate places. This method depends on combining historical and non-historical resources and the paper discusses the potential benefits for humanities research.