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La arqueología española de principios del siglo XX se caracteriza por la diversidad de iniciativas y su consolidación como disciplina científica. En este contexto, se desarrolló el proyecto del Catálogo Monumental de España, cuyo objetivo principal era la compilación del patrimonio español en una publicación. Se trata de una obra imprescindible para la investigación arqueológica, ya que incluye descripciones de yacimientos inéditos e interpretaciones sociales. Tomando como base los volúmenes de las provincias de Ávila, Soria y Burgos, este artículo analiza la representación del género femenino en los discursos historiográficos de contextos prehistóricos y de la Edad del Hierro, utilizando Transkribus, una herramienta que usa Inteligencia Artificial, para producir las transcripciones semiautomáticas de textos manuscritos, y Voyant Tools, para el análisis lingüístico de género. Los resultados de la investigación evidencian la necesidad de contrarrestar los estereotipos de género y crear narrativas más inclusivas.

The application of digital technologies within interdisciplinary environments is enabling the development of more efficient methods and techniques for analyzing historical corpora at scales that were not feasible before. The project “Digging into Early Colonial Mexico” is an example of cooperation among archaeologists, historians, computer scientists, and geographers engaged in designing and implementing methods for text mining and large-scale analysis of primary and secondary historical sources, specifically the automated identification of vital analytical concepts linked to locational references, revealing the spatial and geographic context of the historical narrative. As a case study, the project focuses on the Relaciones Geográficas de la Nueva España (Geographic Reports of New Spain, or RGs). This is a corpus of textual and pictographic documents produced in 1577–1585 ce that provides one of the most complete and extensive accounts of Mexico and Guatemala’s history and the social situation at the time. The research team is developing valuable digital tools and datasets, including (a) a comprehensive historical gazetteer containing thousands of georeferenced toponyms integrated within a geographical information system (GIS); (b) two digital versions of the RGs corpus, one fully annotated and ready for information extraction, and another suitable for further experimentation with algorithms of machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and corpus linguistics (CL) analyses; and (c) software tools that support a research method called geographical text analysis (GTA). GTA applies natural language processing based on deep learning algorithms for named entity recognition, disambiguation, and classification to enable the parsing of texts and the automatic mark-up of words referring to place names that are later associated with analytical concepts through a technique called geographic collocation analysis. By leveraging the benefits of the GTA methodology and resources, the research team is in the process of investigating questions related to the landscape and territorial transformations experienced during the colonization of Mexico, as well as the discovery of social, economic, political, and religious patterns in the way of life of Indigenous and Spanish communities of New Spain toward the last quarter of the 16th century. All datasets and research products will be released under an open-access license for the free use of scholars engaged in Latin American studies or interested in computational approaches to history.

This article reports on the 4th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, held in conjunction with the 28th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. The article outlines the objectives of the workshop, and briefly describes the technical program.

This is the second discussion paper produced by the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Network in consultation with the wider Digital Humanities (DH) community in the two countries and beyond. It summarises the findings of the second workshop organised by the Network, and offers recommendations based on these findings.

This article reports on the 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, held in conjunction with the 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. The article outlines the objectives of the workshop, and briefly describes the technical program.

For some time now, the field of Spatial Humanities has acknowledged the need for a system capable of the spatial exploration of historical and archaeological phenomena beyond Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This idea comes from the need to analyse holistically spatial information, including that which is not geographic (i.e. vague, symbolic and imaginary space). In addition, this need becomes more apparent when dealing with traditions that do not conform to the Modern/European/Cartesian conception of space in which GIS is rooted. This article, explores the use of Qualitative Spatial Representation (QSR) and Semantic Triples as possible alternative means to model complex and diverse expressions of spatial information, including social and symbolic conceptions in 16th century Mexican maps. Using as case study the map from the region of Atengo-Misquiahuala (Hidalgo) which combine the Mesoamerican and European traditions, we explore how these approaches might open new venues of research, potentially shedding light to long discussed and problematic Mesoamerican spatial categories. Focusing on a contained and partial example, we examine from a theoretical perspective and as a starting point, the possible future implementation of these approaches for historical and archaeological research.

Scholars in the humanities have a long tradition in the investigation of spatial theory and methods, as well as on the analysis of space and place within its multiple disciplines. Although technolo...

THE LANDSCAPE CONTEXT of the early 9th-century monument known as the Pillar of Eliseg is interrogated here for the first time with GIS-based analysis and innovative spatial methodologies. Our interpretation aims to move beyond regarding the Pillar as a prominent example of early medieval monument reuse and a probable early medieval assembly site. We argue that the location and topographical context of the cross and mound facilitated the monument’s significance as an early medieval locus of power, faith and commemoration in a contested frontier zone. The specific choice of location is shown to relate to patterns of movement and visibility that may have facilitated and enhanced the ceremonial and commemorative roles of the monument. By shedding new light on the interpretation of the Pillar of Eliseg as a node of social and religious aggregation and ideological power, our study has theoretical and methodological implications for studying the landscape contexts of early medieval stone monuments.

Using a group of medieval romances as a case study and building on Lefebvre’s original proposition, the understanding of space and place changes with time and culture. The objective of this study is to delve into this issue. It proposes a preliminary exploratory methodology that, combining spatial technologies and a linguistic approach, and aims to facilitate the analysis of medieval narratives, accounting for the spatial complexity portrayed, as well as integrating and expediting the exploration of geographical, vague, and imaginary space and place in Humanities-based fields.

The field of Spatial Humanities has advanced substantially in the past years. The identification and extraction of toponyms and spatial information mentioned in historical text collections has allowed its use in innovative ways, making possible the application of spatial analysis and the mapping of these places with Geographic Information Systems. For instance, automated place name identification is nowadays possible with Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems. Statistical NER methods based on supervised learning, in particular, are highly successful with modern datasets. However, there are still major challenges to address when dealing with historical corpora. These challenges include language changes over time, spelling variations, transliterations, OCR errors, and sources written in multiple languages among others. In this article, considering a task of place name recognition over two collections of historical correspondence, we report an evaluation of five NER systems and an approach that combines these through a voting system. We found that although individual performance of each NER system was corpus dependent, the ensemble combination was able to achieve consistent measures of precision and recall, outperforming the individual NER systems. Additionally, the results showed that these NER system are not strongly dependent on pre-processing and translation to modern English.

This article answers the call for scholarship that models the implementation of geographic information systems (GIS) technologies in literary-historical research. In doing so, it creates a step change to the integration of digital methodologies in the humanities. Combining methods and perspectives from cultural history, literary studies, and geographic information sciences, the article confirms, challenges, and extends understanding of Victorian literary tourism in the English Lake District. It engages with the accounts of several nineteenth-century tourists, paying specific attention to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s English Notebooks and Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley’s A Coach Drive at the Lakes, which are examined alongside contemporaneous guidebooks and other commercial tourist publications. In the process, the article draws attention to a spatial correlation between the route of the Ambleside turnpike (the Lake District’s principal coach road) and the major literary sites to which Victorian Lakeland visitors were guided. Recognizing this correlation, we contend, helps to deepen our appreciation of how the physical and imaginative geographies of the Lake District region interrelate. Specifically, it helps us appreciate how the Victorian fascination with the Lakeland’s literary associations was modulated not only by interest in the region’s other attractions, but also by material conditions on the ground.

Historical itineraries, often accessible as lists or tables describing places visited in sequence, are abundant resources and also important objects of study for humanities scholars. This article advances a novel method for automatically geocoding tabular itineraries, combining approximate string matching with a cost optimization algorithm based on dynamic programming. Experiments with a dataset of historical itineraries, with ground-truth geocoding annotations provided by domain experts and leveraging also the GeoNames gazetteer, attest to the effectiveness of the proposed method. The obtained results show that while approximate string matching can already achieve very low median errors, with many toponyms matching exactly against GeoNames entries, the combination with cost optimization can significantly improve results in terms of the average distance towards the correct disambiguations.

Several tasks related to geographical information retrieval and to the geographical information sciences involve toponym matching, that is, the problem of matching place names that share a common referent. In this article, we present the results of a wide-ranging evaluation on the performance of different string similarity metrics over the toponym matching task. We also report on experiments involving the usage of supervised machine learning for combining multiple similarity metrics, which has the natural advantage of avoiding the manual tuning of similarity thresholds. Experiments with a very large dataset show that the performance differences for the individual similarity metrics are relatively small, and that carefully tuning the similarity threshold is important for achieving good results. The methods based on supervised machine learning, particularly when considering ensembles of decision trees, can achieve good results on this task, significantly outperforming the individual similarity metrics.

Toponym matching, i.e. pairing strings that represent the same real-world location, is a fundamental problemfor several practical applications. The current state-of-the-art relies on string similarity metrics, either specifically developed for matching place names or integrated within methods that combine multiple metrics. However, these methods all rely on common sub-strings in order to establish similarity, and they do not effectively capture the character replacements involved in toponym changes due to transliterations or to changes in language and culture over time. In this article, we present a novel matching approach, leveraging a deep neural network to classify pairs of toponyms as either matching or nonmatching. The proposed network architecture uses recurrent nodes to build representations from the sequences of bytes that correspond to the strings that are to be matched. These representations are then combined and passed to feed-forward nodes, finally leading to a classification decision. We present the results of a wide-ranging evaluation on the performance of the proposed method, using a large dataset collected from the GeoNames gazetteer. These results show that the proposed method can significantly outperform individual similarity metrics from previous studies, as well as previous methods based on supervised machine learning for combining multiple metrics.

The aim of this article is to present new research showcasing how Geographic Information Systems in combination with Natural Language Processing and Corpus Linguistics methods can offer innovative venues of research to analyze large textual collections in the Humanities, particularly in historical research. Using as examples parts of the collection of the Registrar General's Reports that contain more than 200,000 pages of descriptions, census data and vital statistics for the UK, we introduce newly developed automated textual tools and well known spatial analyses used in combination to investigate a case study of the references made to cholera and other diseases in these historical sources, and their relationship to place-names during Victorian times. The integration of such techniques has allowed us to explore, in an automatic way, this historical source containing millions of words, to examine the geographies depicted in it, and to identify textual and geographic patterns in the corpus.

This article reports on the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, held in conjunction with the 25th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. The article outlines the objectives of the workshop, and briefly describes the technical program.

Los sig en la arqueología de habla hispana. temas, técnicas y perspectivas.

Although the megalithic phenomenon in southern Iberia has received attention since the mid 19th century, there has been very little attention paid to the role that megalithic structures played in the organisation of prehistoric landscapes. Just as in other areas of Europe, however, southern Iberian megalithic structures must have played complex roles in the social organisation of landscapes that go far beyond their use as funerary containers. Using examples from our work in southern Iberia, we employ GIS-based spatial analysis to explore for the first time various aspects of the landscape dimension of these monuments. We discuss three case studies for which fresh field data have been recently made available. In the first (Almaden de la Plata) we find patterns of association between medieval transhumance routes and megaliths and we use cost-surface modelling to suggest that medieval routes may reflect earlier, prehistoric patterns of movement which in turn suggests that megalithic structures functioned in this area as waypoints within an emerging mobility system for people and livestock. In the second case (Aroche) we show correlations between the locations of megaliths and theoretical territories defined by isochrones and contrast this pattern with the distribution of non-megalithic funerary sites of the Early Bronze Age, concluding that the spatial distribution of megaliths in this region may relate to their role as landmarks. Lastly we describe a far more specific relationship we have encountered in the Antequera region where we believe we have identified a relationship between the orientation of the megalithic structure of Menga, a prominent natural feature and several newly-discovered prehistoric sites. Together, these three examples suggest that the current focus on typology, chronology and contents in the study of Iberian megaliths needs to be matched with efforts to identify and interpret the often highly complex structure of the prehistoric landscapes of which they form an integral part.

Although the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has a long history in archaeology, spatial technologies have been rarely used to analyse the content of textual collections. A newly developed approach termed Geographic Text Analysis (GTA) is now allowing the semi-automated exploration of large corpora incorporating a combination of Natural Language Processing techniques, Corpus Linguistics, and GIS. In this article we explain the development of GTA, propose possible uses of this methodology in the field of archaeology, and give a summary of the challenges that emerge from this type of analysis.

The spatial humanities constitute a rapidly developing research field that has the potential to create a step-change in the ways in which the humanities deal with geography and geographical information. As yet, however, research in the spatial humanities is only just beginning to deliver the applied contributions to knowledge that will prove its significance. Demonstrating the potential of innovations in technical fields is, almost always, a lengthy process, as it takes time to create the required datasets and to design and implement appropriate techniques for engaging with the information those datasets contain. Beyond this, there is the need to define appropriate research questions and to set parameters for interpreting findings, both of which can involve prolonged discussion and debate. The spatial humanities are still in early phases of this process. Accordingly, the purpose of this special issue is to showcase a set of exemplary studies and research projects that not only demonstrate the field's potential to contribute to knowledge across a range of humanities disciplines, but also to suggest pathways for future research. Our ambition is both to demonstrate how the application of exploratory techniques in the spatial humanities offers new insights about the geographies embedded in a diverse range of texts (including letters, works of literature, and official reports) and, at the same time, to encourage other scholars to integrate these techniques in their research.

The topic of movement in archaeology has been extensively studied. Research on human movement during prehistory has become in archaeology and anthropology one of the bases for understanding the dynamics of social and economic relationships, technology, social identity and territoriality, among many other important themes. Although archaeological investigations related to movement have increased in the last decade, the majority have usually relied on “static” evidence, that is, on the analysis of the materials or objects that are found in specific sites, establishing the relationship between them and their points of origin or destination (Branting 2004). In recent years, using spatial technologies, more research has aimed to investigate movement from a landscape perspective, in which more attention has been paid to the processes that may have happened on journeys. Some of these studies have directly or indirectly analysed the possible factors influencing the decisions about which paths to take, the mechanics of movement and the archaeological evidence related to it (Llobera 2000; Fairen Jimenez 2004; Cruz Berrocal 2004; Fabrega Alvarez 2006; Fabrega Alvarez / Parcero Oubina 2007; Llobera / Slukin 2007; Fiz / Orengo 2008; Murrieta-Flores 2010, 2012a; Mlekuž 2010; in the current volume, Lock et al. and Mlekuž among others). In the specific case of Iberia, megalithic monuments are among the archaeological elements at a landscape scale that have been linked to potential patterns of movement, and it has been argued that, besides their symbolic and funerary meanings, they may also have been utilized as landscape markers. The idea of prehistoric monuments as markers can be traced in archaeology to the 1970s with the adoption of Saxe’s (1970) Hypothesis No. 8 by researchers like Fleming (1973), Renfrew (1976) and Chapman (1981). These authors proposed that megalithic monuments may have been used as markers with territorial connotations. Nonetheless, due to the physical and spatial characteristics of the monuments, other hypotheses have also arisen, especially in Iberian archaeology. These theories have pointed out that megalithic monuments were not only an important element structuring prehistoric landscapes, but also that they tend to sustain spatial relationships with historical pathways. This has

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have become widely accepted in historical research and there are increasing calls for them to be used more widely in humanities disciplines. The difficulty is, however, that GIS comes from a quantitative, social science paradigm that is frequently not well suited to the kinds of sources that are widely used in the humanities. The challenge for GIS, if it is to become a widely used tool within the humanities, is thus two-fold. First, approaches need to be developed that allow humanities sources to be exploited within a data model that is usable by GIS. Second, and more importantly, researchers need to demonstrate that by adopting GIS they can make significant new and substantive contributions to knowledge across humanities disciplines. This paper explores both of these questions focussing primarily on examples from literary studies, in the form of representations of the English Lake District and history, looking at nineteenth century public health reports. A GIS is effectively a form of database. It differs from a conventional database in that every item of data within it is linked to a location on the map, thus a typical GIS will consist of a table of quantitative data where each row within the table is linked to a point, line or polygon (representing an area) that maps the location to which the row of data refers. The key advantage of this structure is that it allows the user to explore not only what is occurring but also where it is oc [...]

In order to better support the text mining of historical texts, we propose a combination of complementary techniques from Geographical Information Systems, computational and corpus linguistics. In previous work, we have described this as `visual gisting' to extract important themes from text and locate those themes on a map representing geographical information contained in the text. Here, we describe the steps that were found necessary to apply standard analysis and resolution tools to identify place names in a specific corpus of historical texts. This task is seen as an initial and prerequisite step for further analysis and comparison by combining the information we extract from a corpus with information from other sources, including other text corpora. The process is intended to support close reading of historical texts on a much larger scale by highlighting using exploratory and data-driven approaches which parts of the corpus warrant further close analysis. Our case study presented here is from a corpus of Lake District travel literature. We discuss the customisations that we have to make to existing tools to extract placename information and visualise it on a map.

Lucha Libre has played an important role in Mexican culture since the late 1950s. The sport became famous mainly due to its masked wrestlers, who incorporated their own family traditions, beliefs and fears into the design of their masks, transforming an ordinary person into a fearless character. After the introduction of the Monsters Cinema in the 1930s, Mexican audiences welcomed and adopted characters like Dracula, Nosferatu, Frankenstein and The Werewolf. The success of Monster Cinema in Mexican culture was based on the integration of national legends and beliefs, placing them in local and identifiable concepts in the Mexican popular imagination. Later, Lucha Libre Cinema mixed with Monster Cinema resulting in the birth of new heroes and myths. These emergent paladins of the Mexican metropolis set the cultural and moral standards of that time and how Mexicans wanted to be perceived. Through an anthropological and historical analysis of Mexican Cinema and Lucha Libre, this paper investigates the main social interaction of male wrestlers who perform as heroes inside the celluloid world and outside of it. We explore how masculinity and the male figure evolves in Lucha Libre Cinema, and the processes that wrestlers have to undergo in order to be able to portray themselves as superheroes of an evolving and fast growing Mexico.

Viajar es un acto inherente al ser humano. Desde buscar agua, hasta trasladarse a regiones remotas para comerciar o intercambiar productos, viajar a diversas escalas geograficas ha constituido una actividad esencial en el desarrollo de cualquier sociedad. Hoyen dia, contamos con una amplia red de comunicaciones y medios de transporte cada vez mas comunes donde desplazarse, constituye una tarea mecanica y sin complicaciones. Sin embargo, esto no fue siempre asi. Durante la Prehistoria, viajar represento enfrentarse a una serie de dificultades practicas, ya que no se contaba con mapas o cualquiera de las comodidades existentes hoy en dia.

Los monumentos megalíticos han sido estudiados desde diversas perspectivas y su arquitectura y función se encuentran entre los temas más recurrentes. A pesar de los extensos estudios al respecto, consideramos que para obtener una profunda comprensión de los aspectos sociales y culturales en que se hallan inmersos, también es necesario acercarse a ellos desde una perspectiva más completa, tomando en cuenta su contexto geográfico. En este sentido, el presente artículo da en primera instancia una visión general de la relación entre estos monumentos y sus paisajes, articulada en una correspondencia en la que se piensa lo cultural-natural, como parte integral de un mismo fenómeno. Asimismo, busca también discutir particularidades específicas que hablan de esta relación, como lo son el acceso a materias primas para su construcción, cosmovisión y referencia a otros puntos geográficos, patrones de movimiento y rutas, así como su localización y visibilidad. Finalmente, se persigue enfatizar el carácter dinámico de los monumentos megalíticos en los procesos implícitos en la formación del paisaje prehistórico

Drawing on the expertise of leading researchers from around the globe, this pioneering collection of essays explores how geospatial technologies are revolutionizing the discipline of literary studies. The book offers the first intensive examination of digital literary cartography, a field whose recent and rapid development has yet to be coherently analysed. This collection not only provides an authoritative account of the current state of the field, but also informs a new generation of digital humanities scholars about the critical and creative potentials of digital literary mapping. The book showcases the work of exemplary literary mapping projects and provides the reader with an overview of the tools, techniques and methods those projects employ.