Towards an Extensible Framework for Understanding Spatial Narratives

Spatial narratives help us to organize experiences and give them meaning. Previous approaches to understanding geographies in textual sources focus on geoparsing to automatically identify place names and allocate them to coordinates. Those are highly quantitative, and are limited to named places with coordinates, and have little concept of time. Narratives of journeys indicate that human experiences of geography are often subjective and more suited to qualitative representation. Geography is not limited to named places but incorporates the vague, imprecise, and ambiguous, e.g "the camp", or "the hills in the distance", and relative locations such as "near to", "on the left", "north of" or "a few hours' journey from". Places are organized worlds of meaning, characterized by experience, emotion, and memory as well as by geography. In this paper, we discuss our approach to gaining more insight from textual data beyond the toponyms and introduce an extensible framework for extracting, analyzing, and visualizing spatial elements that define the 'locale' as well as the 'sense of place' referenced in text using two test corpora --the Corpus of the Lake District Writing and Holocaust Survivors' Testimonies.