Chalice project helping to create digital historical gazetteer

The Connecting Historical Authorities with Linked Data, Contexts and Entities (Chalice) project is helping to create a digital gazetteer of historical place names covering a thousand years of recorded history.

The Language Technology Group at the University of Edinburgh, who are collaborating with EDINA’s Unlock Text place name text mining service, are building text mining tools to extract structured data from volumes of the English Place Name Survey, a rich resource of historical place name scholarship published by the Institute for Name Studies at the University of Nottingham. The data includes all known historical spellings of the place name as recorded by the Survey, along with the dates when the names were found in different documentary sources. The corrected digitised text has been created by the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at Queen’s University, Belfast.

At EDINA we’re converting the extracted data into Linked Data, making it available in a machine-readable form and extending it with links to contemporary place name gazetteers. We’re also investigating ways to enrich different historic archival collections with place names and locations – linking resources together through shared references to geography.

Our partners at the Centre for e-Research at King’s College London are helping us to develop use cases for the data produced during Chalice, working on detailed studies on enriching different historical collections with place name references.