The project I was exploring was the Geo News Miner (GNM) site visualizing the references to place names in the news. This was created by researchers and engineers at Utrecht University for educational purposes. The data is gathered from ChroniclItaly: A Corpus of Italian American Newspapers which collections of Italian newspapers published in the United States. The data was gathered from Chronicling America which is an open access, searchable database of newspapers published in the states from 1789 to 1963. GNM filtered the Italian newspapers and organized the data to include year, type of location, and number of pages in the newspaper, and more. This was then presented in a map format color coded, correlating the the number of pages to each country; the darker the color, the more the pages. Additionally, there are more features allowing to change time periods, frequencies, cities, regions, and types of historical maps.
GNM illustrates how the visualization of place names can provide researchers with new perspectives on the geographies of the past thus opening up new ways to study history
Viola, Lorella, de Bruin, Jonathan, van Eijden, Kees and Verheul, Jaap. 2019. The GeoNewsMiner (GNM): An interactive spatial humanities tool to visualize geographical references in historical newspapers (v. 1.0). Utrecht: Utrecht University.
The goal of this project is mainly education. It is intended to be a tool for researchers in spatial humanities looking at the looking at the historical contexts of geographical spaces. This especially connects to the option to select different types of historical maps of different time periods because it depicts the changes in political borders of countries in those times. Analyzing the newspapers shows the geo-political presence of the countries. However, it is US-centric as shown by the highest count being the United States in all eras and that the data is coming from papers published in the states. I would like to know how this project can be expanded to explore publications in other languages and countries and how that would impact the count.
