Lecture at DIGHT-Net Summer School in Digital Cultural Heritage: (Re)Mediating the Past

University of Tallinn, Estonia

28. August 2025, 9:30–10:30

Geoparsing refers to the extraction of spatial information from unstructured text, typically through the identification and disambiguation of place names. This process enables the conversion of texts into maps. In the context of cultural heritage, geoparsing offers new avenues for cultural-historical research and the study of spatial history. Where are the centres and peripheries of a textual corpus?

In this lecture, I introduce the basic principles of geoparsing technology and demonstrate its practical application in cultural-historical research through two case studies. The first draws on my project Romantic Cartographies: Lived and Imagined Space in English and German Romantic Texts, 1790–1840, which investigated spatial constructions in early nineteenth-century German- and English-language Romantic literature, using materials from the digital archive European Literature, 1790–1840: The Corvey Collection. The second example comes from the project Atlas of Finnish Literature, 1870–1940 mapping place names mentioned in Finnish-language fiction from that period.