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Many scholars have used local Chinese county gazetteers for historical and socioeconomic analyses, yet little research has examined the completeness of coverage or the biases in reporting that characterize the compilation of these gazetteers. In this paper, we provide a novel source for studying Chinese political movements and local history under the communist regime after 1949: the internal-discussion drafts of county gazetteers (xianzhi pingyigao). Our findings constitute the first study to use internal review drafts to examine the authenticity and credibility of county gazetteers. Prior to their publication, gazetteer drafts are compiled by a team of editors and typically receive at least three rounds of rigorous internal review. These internal-discussion drafts are subject to a prolonged and strict process of self and external censorship. Our analysis engages in a close comparison of text samples extracted from two versions of local gazetteers collected from four counties in Guangxi province. Compared to the draft versions, we find evidence of serious data manipulation and a tendency to underreport historical events in the published editions. Our research evidently demonstrates the process of historiography editing and reveals how local history is presented through the lens of government public documents in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Ziti xiaozhi 紫隄小志 and Ziticun xiaozhi 紫隄村小志, compiled by Wang Yong’an 汪永安 in the early Qing Dynasty. Through the analysis of the genesis context and content changes of these local gazetteers, this paper shows how local social conditions and changes in the political environment affected the content of local gazetteers. In particular, I first demonstrate that Wang Yong’an’s inclusion of a large number of good deeds of the Hou 侯 family of Shanggu 上谷 and the Wang 汪 family of Pingyang 平陽 in his gazetteers had two purposes. On one hand, it was an attempt to influence compilers of official gazetteers to include members of their own clans. On the other hand, it reflected his belief that narratives of loyalty and righteousness could change the declining moral standards of Ziti villagers. Second, this paper also points out that in Ziticun xiaozhi, Wang Yong’an deleted sensitive content that expressed nostalgia for the Ming Dynasty and that affirmed the legitimacy of the Southern Ming regime. This reflects the latent self-censorship that emerged among literati during the Yongzheng 雍 正 period and illustrates the profound impact of political changes on how local elites wrote township gazetteers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influenced by a cosmological view of the interconnectedness between heaven and humankind, ancient Chinese astrologers developed the fenye (分野, "field allocation") system. This theory envisioned correspondence between heaven and earth and was a prevalent regional positioning system in ancient China. However, during the Qianlong era (1736-1796), fenye theory faced skepticism and rejection from official quarters, leading to a significant crisis for this traditional positioning system. With the eastward spread of Western learning, modern European astronomical and geographical knowledge were introduced into China, and Chinese intellectuals began to favor the Western system of latitude and longitude for geographical positioning. In the late Qing period, the gradual popularization of the spherical Earth concept and the latitude and longitude system laid the theoretical foundation for establishing of this system. The public dissemination of latitude and longitude data measured by the imperial astronomical and calendrical institutions, along with mathematicians' calculations based on historical data and the supplementary measurements conducted by local governments, provided data support for the system's establishment. By the end of the Qing dynasty, as the knowledge structures and worldviews of Chinese intellectuals transformed, the traditional celestial-terrestrial correspondence in Chinese local gazetteers was phased out, giving way to the latitude and longitude system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the resilience of fenye (分野, lit., "field allocation") and its applications through the nineteenth century in China. Despite literati (and eventually imperial) criticisms that the fenye system of correlative cosmography was outdated and unworthy of belief, fenye retained a sizeable audience through the close of the Qing period. At the top, the Qing imperial state continued to reference fenye correlations in its official communications late into the dynasty. In local society, literati looked to newly issued dynastic sources of astrological knowledge to update local gazetteers; in the nineteenth century, these trends were pronounced along frontier areas lacking longstanding gazetteer records. Finally, people engaged in the practice of fengshui looked to fenye knowledge to update the values and layout of the compass, the historical origins of which related to geomantic practices. In the Qing period, the compass was both theoretically and physically altered under the influence of Jesuit-introduced "Western Learning" (Xixue 西學). The paper contends that the status of fenye in pre-twentieth century China was seldom an allor-nothing proposition between a celebrated component of imperial orthodoxy and an outdated relic in inexorable decline: people critiqued fenye, used fenye, and updated fenye. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has often been argued that the introduction of early modern European cosmology at the turn of the seventeenth century by Jesuit missionaries—subsumed under the generic term "Western learning" (xixue 西學)—signalled the demise of traditional fenye (分野, or "field allocation") theory, as the concept of Earth's sphericity and the widened sense of world geography are fundamentally at odds with the Sinocentric worldview underpinning fenye. However, the fenye chapters in Qing dynasty local gazetteers tell a different story: in comparison with earlier Ming gazetteers their proportion increased. These chapters rarely take a stance against Western learning. Rather, they invoke Western learning as part and parcel of the imperially sanctioned astronomy to be reckoned with, or even suggest it as a remedy for flaws in traditional fenye techniques, leading to a plurality of discourses in which Sino-Western relationships become entangled with tension between the imperial and the local. This phenomenon is particularly visible in the peripheral regions of the empire, such as Guangxi, as these were traditionally marginalised in the Sinocentric cosmology of the fenye system. This paper explores cosmological discourses to answer the following questions: What were the agendas that Western learning was made to serve in these gazetteers? How did local endeavours relate to court-sponsored imperial projects? What were their sources of knowledge on matters of Western learning, and how can we map out the geography of Western learning based on these local sources? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fenye (分野, lit., "field allocation"), is a traditional Chinese astrological system that associated celestial phenomena with regions on earth since ancient times. During middle and late imperial China, many literati writings criticized this system as illogical. Yet in the local gazetteers that were compiled in late imperial China to document local data within each administrative region, compilers continued to use fenye as the canonical way to identify their regions within the vast empire. The Jesuit introduction of Western sciences to China, in particular the technology that could precisely locate any place or region with latitude and longitude, appeared to render fenye obsolete, which fueled even more literati criticism. Modern scholars consider the public criticism from the Qianlong emperor and the resulting removal of fenye from the 1781 Rehe Gazetteer the end of fenye in imperial orthodoxy. However, by quantitatively analyzing a collection of 4,410 titles of local gazetteers and their section headings, this paper reveals many examples of local literati who resisted removing fenye entirely from their local history, well into the late Republican period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the textual history and genealogical claims in the Quanzhou Qianfo xinzhu zhuzushi song 泉州千佛新著諸祖師頌 (Or.8210/S.1635), a collection of encomia composed by Wendeng 文僜 (d. 972) that documents the formation of the so-called "southern" Chan lineage and provides a crucial link between the Baolin zhuan 寶林傳 and the Zutang ji 祖堂集. The focus of this paper is on reexamining the potentially layered nature of Wendeng's work based on the preface by Huiguan 慧觀 (d.u.), internal evidence from the Dunhuang manuscript, and related accounts in Chan records and local gazetteers. In addition, this study investigates the genealogical glosses in S.1635 and suggests that these were probably not authored by Wendeng and therefore cannot be taken as evidence of his understanding of the pedigree of the presumed successors to Huineng 慧能 (638–713). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many detailed data on past geological hazard events are buried in geological hazard reports and have not been fully utilized. The growing developments in geographic information retrieval and temporal information retrieval offer opportunities to analyse this wealth of data to mine the spatiotemporal evolution of geological disaster occurrence and enhance risk decision making. This study presents a combined NLP and ontology matching information extraction framework for automatically recognizing semantic and spatiotemporal information from geological hazard reports. This framework mainly extracts unstructured information from geological disaster reports through named entity recognition, ontology matching and gazetteer matching to identify and annotate elements, thus enabling users to quickly obtain key information and understand the general content of disaster reports. In addition, we present the final results obtained from the experiments through a reasonable visualization and analyse the visual results. The extraction and retrieval of semantic information related to the dynamics of geohazard events are performed from both natural and human perspectives to provide information on the progress of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Place names facilitate locating and distinguishing geographic space where human activities and natural phenomena occur. Extracting place names at multiple spatial resolutions from text is beneficial in several tasks such as identifying the location of events, enriching gazetteers, discovering connections between events and places, etc. Most modern place name extraction approaches generalize the linguistic rules and lexical features as a universal rule and ignore patterns inherent in place names in the geographic contexts. As a result, they lack spatial awareness to effectively identify place names from different geographic contexts, especially the lesser-known place names. In this research, we develop a novel Spatially-Aware Location Extraction (SALE) algorithm for place name extraction from structured documents that uses a hybrid approach comprising of knowledge-driven and data-driven methods. We build a custom named entity recognition (NER) system based on the conditional random field (CRF) and train/ fine-tune it using spatial features extracted from a dataset based on a given geographic region. SALE uses multiple pathways, including the use of the spatially tuned NER to enhance the efficacy in our place names extraction. The experimental results using a large geographic region show that our algorithm outperforms well-known state-of-the-art place name recognizers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence has led to renewed interest in natural language processing. Named entity recognition (NER) is a classic problem in natural language processing. Investigating named entities is a continuing concern within information extraction. Names of people, organizations, locations, events, etc. are named entities (NEs). Although extensive research has been carried out on NER, limited study exists that explores NER in the Marathi language. The paper aims to provide a conceptual theoretical framework based on the gazetteer matching technique for named entity recognition system development for the Marathi language. A combination of rules and regular expressions is considered for temporal and numerical pattern recognition. The techniques presented in this paper are systematic, clear, and effective for morphologically rich language processing tool development. The system described in the paper reports a satisfactory performance with 62.64% NE identification and 72.27% NE classification accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on two methods employed in the selection, interpretation, and representation of diverse source materials for developing alternative biographies for my ancestral landscape - Nanhai district in the Pearl River Delta in southern China. These biographies aim to approach Nanhai from a long view of continual transformation, as opposed to prevalent readings of the region that focus on the striking spatial contrasts and large-scale developments that have only come about in recent decades. The chronological reading explores a critical shift in the cosmological understanding of the landscape situated in the 19th century through a selection of historical gazetteer maps, while in the excavational reading the diffuse continuity of the lineage in the present-day landscape of Nanhai is traced. In both methods, the drawing functions as a crucial (research) tool to engage the range of source materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Mesopotamian Ancient Place-names Almanac" (MAPA) focuses on the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk and its extensive hinterland (Biblical Erech, modern Warka), one of the world's first mega-cities. Uruk possesses some of the earliest attestations of the cuneiform writing system, and it boasts of being the royal seat of the legendary king Gilgamesh. MAPA is a first step in integrating textual sources with remote sensing data for reconstructing the social and physical geography of Mesopotamia in the Age of Empires. The dataset presented here is the recent edition of the gazetteer (v. 1.0), follows linked open data (LOD) protocols, and draws close to 400 place-names from legal, economic, and administrative texts the rich first millennium BCE archives of Uruk; namely, those produced under the Assyrian, Babylonian and Achaemenid empires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of science in modern China often explore their subjects within global or national frameworks. This essay uses data from gazetteers to address the place-based nature of Chinese agricultural science as it developed at smaller geographical scales. Information contained in gazetteers suggests that regional environmental knowledge and site-specific social networks influenced the construction and communication of scientific ideas about farming at the local level. By highlighting these dimensions of knowledge making, this essay demonstrates the benefits of using gazetteers to grapple with the importance of place in Chinese science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides an overview of the Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT) developed by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and examines the ways that LoGaRT could aid in redrawing the map of modern science in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LoGart, and especially its image search function Page with Image (PWI), allows for the use of local gazetteers to trace the development of new institutions and spaces for science in China in a geographically more diverse assortment of places than historians of science have hitherto examined. This essay looks at how results obtained by using LoGart help to map out a new spatiality of science in modern China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911), local gazetteer maps helped to disseminate the innovations of longitude and latitude used in Western cartography. The use of longitude and latitude lines alongside the traditional Chinese cartographic method of "grid scales" suggests that mapmakers chose an ingenious compromise to accommodate new knowledge alongside traditional practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘Digital Index of North American Archaeology’ (DINAA) project demonstrates how the aggregation and publication of government-held archaeological data can help to document human activity over millennia and at a continental scale. These data can provide a valuable link between specific categories of information available from publications, museum collections and online databases. Integration improves the discovery and retrieval of records of archaeological research currently held by multiple institutions within different information systems. It also aids in the preservation of those data and makes efforts to archive these research results more resilient to political turmoil. While DINAA focuses on North America, its methods have global applicability.

The region of the Luofu Mountains in Guangdong, China, has long been a Daoist sacred place for centuries. In the Daoist sacred geographic system "Dongtian Fudi" (Grotto-Heavens and Blissful Lands), the Luofu Mountains are ranked as the seventh "Major Grotto-Heaven", standing as an influential site for the practice Daoist immortals. Due to a sense of local pride and responsibility, the Guangdong literatus Han Huang (active approx. 1600–1639) compiled an important gazetteer named Luofu yesheng (The Unofficial Gazetteer of the Luofu Mountains) in 1639, which is largely underexplored. By investigating the texts and images within Luofu yesheng and by comparing them with other gazetteers of the Luofu Mountains compiled during the Ming dynasty, this article discovers that Han Huang compiled such a gazetteer and demonstrated the religious sacredness of the Luofu Mountains to advocate for recognition of their status as a grotto-heaven and by imaginatively reconstructing their lost religious sites in Luofu yesheng's texts and images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese named entity recognition plays an important role in downstream tasks such as machine translation and intelligent question answering. A new Chinese named entity recognition algorithm based on gazetteers and syntactic dependency tree is proposed in this paper. To solve the problem of error transmission caused by the lack of word information in character vector and syntactic dependent structure information between words. This algorithm forms a graph of the gazetteers information and the syntactic dependency tree information in the sentence and then integrates it into the character vector through adaptive gated graph neural networks (AGGNN), so that the semantic relationship between words is obtained well in each character vector and the recognition accuracy is improved. Through the verification in Ecommerce, Resume, QI and other data sets, the new method can greatly improve the accuracy of Chinese entity recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Web is a source of information for Location-Based Service (LBS) applications. These applications lack postal addresses for the user's Point of Interests (POIs) such as schools, hospitals, restaurants, etc., as these locations are annotated manually by using the yellow pages or by the location owners (users/companies). Our study in this paper confirms that Google Maps, a common LBS application, only contains about 32.5 % of the public schools that are registered officially in the documents provided by the Directorate of Education in Egypt. However, the remaining missed school addresses could be fished from the Web (e.g., social media). To the best of our knowledge, no prior survey has been published to compare the previous Web postal address extraction approaches. Additionally, all proposed approaches for address extraction are local (could be working in specific countries/locations with particular languages) and could not be used or even adapted to work in other countries/locations with other languages. Furthermore, the problem of Web postal address extraction is not addressed in many countries such as Arab countries (e.g. Egypt). This paper discusses the issue of address extraction, highlights and compares the recently used techniques in extracting addresses from Web pages. In addition, it investigates the discrepancy of knowledge among existing systems. Moreover, it provides a comprehensive review of the geographical Gazetteers used in the Web postal address approaches and compares their data quality dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural language descriptions of geographical locations are used frequently in daily life and there is a motivation to create systems that generate such descriptions automatically, for purposes such as documentation of where events have taken place, where a person is located, where photos were taken and where plants and animals are located. Typically location descriptions combine references to named geographical features with vague spatial relational terms, such as near, north of and at that relate locations to the features. Here we describe a system for generating location descriptions, that combines spatial templates, that model the applicability of different spatial relations relative to a reference location, with toponyms in the vicinity of the described location that are selected according to aspects of salience. The toponyms are retrieved from a gazetteer service based on OpenStreetMap for which we create a hierarchical feature classification scheme to facilitate selection of toponyms according to distinctiveness of their feature types and other aspects of salience. The advantages of the approach are demonstrated in a user study, relative to an existing state of the art system and to other baseline approaches that include manually created captions and the automated methods of two widely used photo captioning systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the current work of the Commission on Names of Localities and Physiographic Objects to put Poland's official geographical names in order. It outlines the main trends resulting from the requests of local authorities: changes in the forms of names (phonetic, inflectional, and derivational), renominations aiming to eliminate the discord between the official and non-official toponymy, establishing names for newly created or nameless objects, changes in the type of locality, and the abolition of names. Particular attention was paid to the impact of the regulations of various central administrative authorities on naming, the principles of the codification of names were presented, the Commission's actions to counteract the mass abolition of names of small objects, and conclusions drawn on the effects of its work between 2017-2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article, which forms the second part of a two-part article in this volume, reflects on what we argue to be the most crucial element of any Linked Data enterprise: its community. The first section discusses a variety of funded and unfunded activities conducted under the aegis of Pelagios, and specifically two 'small grant' programmes that dramatically expanded its scope and reach. The second section describes the evolution of Pelagios as a 'community of practice', in which the work of the initiative, conceived of in terms of both method and tool development, has been facilitated by, and coordinated with, individuals and groups external to its investigative teams. This growing and maturing community has ultimately been realized in the foundation of a formal voluntary organization: the Pelagios Network Association. The paper concludes with brief reflections on some interlinked sister initiatives that have emerged from the Pelagios community and continue to support scholars and practitioners working in related fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a short history of the methods and tools developed by the Pelagios initiative: a series of seven projects dedicated to linking digital historical resources based on the geographic places to which they relate and refer. The first section of the article situates the work within the wider field of semantic and geospatial technologies. It then describes the initial development of the Pelagios methodology through an open consortium of ancient Mediterranean data resource providers, in association with the Pleiades Gazetteer of the Ancient World. The second section details how this approach was expanded for application in other historical and archaeological periods and domains, with a special focus on tool development. In particular, we reflect on the development and application of Recogito, an online semantic geoannotation platform that allows anyone to identify place references within historical texts, imagery or datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The region of the Luofu Mountains in Guangdong, China, has long been a Daoist sacred place for centuries. In the Daoist sacred geographic system “Dongtian Fudi” (Grotto-Heavens and Blissful Lands), the Luofu Mountains are ranked as the seventh “Major Grotto-Heaven”, standing as an influential site for the practice Daoist immortals. Due to a sense of local pride and responsibility, the Guangdong literatus Han Huang (active approx. 1600–1639) compiled an important gazetteer named Luofu yesheng (The Unofficial Gazetteer of the Luofu Mountains) in 1639, which is largely underexplored. By investigating the texts and images within Luofu yesheng and by comparing them with other gazetteers of the Luofu Mountains compiled during the Ming dynasty, this article discovers that Han Huang compiled such a gazetteer and demonstrated the religious sacredness of the Luofu Mountains to advocate for recognition of their status as a grotto-heaven and by imaginatively reconstructing their lost religious sites in Luofu yesheng’s texts and images.

As a result of the Perczel Project outlined by Mátyás Márton in 2007 at the Department of Cartography and Geoinformatics of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), the complete digital restoration and then reconstruction of the 127.5 cm diameter manuscript globe was completed in 2019. The final cartographic completion of the ongoing task at the department by 2013 – led by Mátyás Márton, the project manager, who carried out this work with the help of Judit Paksi –, which included the work of many lecturers and students, aimed at saving the globe.Using this augmented digital processing, it was also possible to create three artistic copies of Perczel's globe, which was originally made in 1862. This unique work of art, which has suffered irreparable damage due to the ordeals of the 20th century, is of great cultural value and also very important for our cartographic heritage, has been reborn.Following the digital reconstruction, there was a good opportunity to revive another related project. The website, "The interactive gazetteer of Perczel's globe", which was born as a result of the work of Zsuzsanna Ungvári and Tibor Tokai earlier, was also created with a new, expanded content. The present study presents the antecedents of gazetteer creation and describes the most important steps of current processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION: Huge amount of geographically referenced information is available on World Wide Web and has become an excellent source for retrieval of desired information. Extraction of relevant information from such a huge unstructured source is not an easy task. OBJECTIVES: In this paper, we propose a location based search engine, designing two indexes namely spatial index and inverted index. Using these indexes, we are able to solve toponym ambiguity and overlapping of documents. METHODS: To handle toponym ambiguity problem, we designed and implemented architecture for directional web document search. The architecture poses spatial followed by textual indexing for toponym resolution and to reduce overlapping of documents in geographical locations. RESULTS: The proposed architecture was implemented and tested on spatial and textural data sets. CONCLUSION: The performance is measured in terms of precision and false positive parameters and found that the proposed architecture performs better for geo/geo and geo/non-geo search queries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of Spatial Humanities has prompted for interdisciplinary work on digitized texts, especially since the significance of place names exceeds the usually admitted frame of deictic and indexical functions. In this perspective, I present a visualization of toponyms co-occurrences in the literary journal Die Fackel ("The Torch"), published by the satirist and language critic Karl Kraus in Vienna from 1899 until 1936. The distant reading experiments consist in drawing lines on maps in order to uncover patterns which are not easily retraceable during close reading. I discuss their status in the context of a digital humanities study. This is not an authoritative cartography of the work but rather an indirect depiction of the viewpoint of Kraus and his contemporaries. Drawing on Kraus' vitriolic recording of political life, toponyms in Die Fackel tell a story about the ongoing reconfiguration of Europe.

In this report we briefly introduce the rationale behind a pilot project that is meant to serve as a test case for the feasibility of a longue-durée historical investigation of large-scale material infrastructures. The larger project is aimed at a critical analysis of how large-scale infrastructures such as roads, city walls, and bridges have contributed to regional and empire-wide integration, but equally why and how processes of integration regularly broke down, and how large-scale infrastructure projects contributed to countervailing trends including local tension, local autonomy, and cross-border regional formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]