Last week Beatrice Alex held the first workshop on using the Edinburgh Geoparser at the Digital Day of Ideas 2016. This was one in a set of hands-on workshops on using different tools and techniques relevant to Digital Humanities research, including visualisation in D3, Drupal, tweeting/blogging for academics and WordPress.
The Edinburgh Geoparser is a language processing tool designed to detect place name references in English text and ground them against an authoritative gazetteer so that they can be plotted on a map. It is operated via the command line. Given the event’s broad audience from the Humanities and Social Sciences, the workshop was targetted at participants with limited command line expertise.
The attendees were able to follow the material and made useful suggestions related to the inner workings of the tool. The workshop slides can be found here.