GAP

Full project title:
Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus project

Researchers

 * Elton Barker, The Open University
 * Eric C. Kansa, University of California-Berkeley
 * Leif Isaksen, University of Southampton
 * Kate Byrne, Institute of Informatics, Edinburgh
 * Nick Rabinowitz

Details
See announcements at:


 * http://www.southampton.ac.uk/archaeology/news/acrgnews_22_07_2010_isaksen.shtml
 * http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/our-commitment-to-digital-humanities.html

Description
GAP addresses two primary concerns related to online resources: discovery and usability, using the ancient world as a test case. No one person is going to able to find all the ancient places referenced in large text corpora (like the one million plus Google Books corpus): for that you need a helping hand. GAP is constructing a search engine (based on the Edinburgh Geoparser), which automatically finds (“geotag”) references to ancient places in a text and then links (“georesolve”) them to a gazetteer. In order to visualize the results in meaningful ways, GAP is using a single-screen application called GapVis with various components to help the reader navigate through a text geospatially.