Towards an Extensible Framework for Understanding Spatial Narratives
Authors: 
Ignatius Ezeani, 
Paul Rayson, 
Ian Gregory, Erum Haris, 
Anthony Cohn, John Stell, Tim Cole, Joanna Taylor, David Bodenhamer, Neil Devadasan, Erik Steiner, Zephyr Frank, Jackie OlsonAuthors Info & Claims
Pages 1 - 10
Abstract
Spatial narratives help us to organize experiences and give them meaning. Previous approaches to understanding geographies in textual sources focus on geoparsing to automatically identify place names and allocate them to coordinates. Those are highly quantitative, and are limited to named places with coordinates, and have little concept of time. Narratives of journeys indicate that human experiences of geography are often subjective and more suited to qualitative representation. Geography is not limited to named places but incorporates the vague, imprecise, and ambiguous, e.g "the camp", or "the hills in the distance", and relative locations such as "near to", "on the left", "north of" or "a few hours' journey from". Places are organized worlds of meaning, characterized by experience, emotion, and memory as well as by geography. In this paper, we discuss our approach to gaining more insight from textual data beyond the toponyms and introduce an extensible framework for extracting, analyzing, and visualizing spatial elements that define the 'locale' as well as the 'sense of place' referenced in text using two test corpora --the Corpus of the Lake District Writing and Holocaust Survivors' Testimonies.
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Index Terms
- Towards an Extensible Framework for Understanding Spatial Narratives
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November 2023
68 pages
ISBN:9798400703492
DOI:10.1145/3615887
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Publication History
Published: 13 November 2023
Accepted: 06 October 2023
Revised: 04 October 2023
Received: 15 September 2023
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- US National Science Foundation
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SIGSPATIAL '23: The 31st ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems
November 13, 2023
Hamburg, Germany
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