Textual Geographies

FAIN: HK-250673-16

Wayne State University (Detroit, MI 48201-1347)
Matthew Wilkens (Project Director: February 2016 to January 2025)

The further refinement of the dataset and the development of the user interface for the Textual Geographies project, which allows scholars and students to extract and study spatial references found in collections housed in the HathiTrust Digital Library.

The Textual Geographies project collects, organizes, and makes widely available high-quality geographic data from millions of books in multiple languages to enable new scholarship in the humanities. The project responds to demonstrated need in fields including literary studies, history, foreign languages, area studies, geography, and allied disciplines for large-scale information about the uses of geographic space in textual sources. Textual Geographies builds on the resources of the HathiTrust Digital Library, using natural language processing and geocoding techniques to associate spatial data with textual references in about 10 million digitized volumes. The project integrates with the products and services of the HathiTrust Research Center and provides a sophisticated, intuitive user interface akin to Google Ngrams for visualization and analysis, as well as direct access to the underlying geographic data.