Mapping the Past: Geographically Linking an Early 20th Century Swedish Encyclopedia with Wikidata

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Hauptverfasser: Ahlin, Axel, Myrne, Alfred, Nugues, Pierre
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Ahlin, Axel
Myrne, Alfred
Nugues, Pierre
author_facet Ahlin, Axel
Myrne, Alfred
Nugues, Pierre
contents In this paper, we describe the extraction of all the location entries from a prominent Swedish encyclopedia from the early 20th century, the \textit{Nordisk Familjebok} `Nordic Family Book.' We focused on the second edition called \textit{Uggleupplagan}, which comprises 38 volumes and over 182,000 articles. This makes it one of the most extensive Swedish encyclopedias. Using a classifier, we first determined the category of the entries. We found that approximately 22 percent of them were locations. We applied a named entity recognition to these entries and we linked them to Wikidata. Wikidata enabled us to extract their precise geographic locations resulting in almost 18,000 valid coordinates. We then analyzed the distribution of these locations and the entry selection process. It showed a higher density within Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The paper sheds light on the selection and representation of geographic information in the \textit{Nordisk Familjebok}, providing insights into historical and societal perspectives. It also paves the way for future investigations into entry selection in different time periods and comparative analyses among various encyclopedias.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_17903
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mapping the Past: Geographically Linking an Early 20th Century Swedish Encyclopedia with Wikidata
Ahlin, Axel
Myrne, Alfred
Nugues, Pierre
Computation and Language
Digital Libraries
In this paper, we describe the extraction of all the location entries from a prominent Swedish encyclopedia from the early 20th century, the \textit{Nordisk Familjebok} `Nordic Family Book.' We focused on the second edition called \textit{Uggleupplagan}, which comprises 38 volumes and over 182,000 articles. This makes it one of the most extensive Swedish encyclopedias. Using a classifier, we first determined the category of the entries. We found that approximately 22 percent of them were locations. We applied a named entity recognition to these entries and we linked them to Wikidata. Wikidata enabled us to extract their precise geographic locations resulting in almost 18,000 valid coordinates. We then analyzed the distribution of these locations and the entry selection process. It showed a higher density within Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The paper sheds light on the selection and representation of geographic information in the \textit{Nordisk Familjebok}, providing insights into historical and societal perspectives. It also paves the way for future investigations into entry selection in different time periods and comparative analyses among various encyclopedias.
title Mapping the Past: Geographically Linking an Early 20th Century Swedish Encyclopedia with Wikidata
topic Computation and Language
Digital Libraries
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17903