We report on two JISC-funded projects that aimed to enrich the metadata of digitized historical collections with georeferences and other information automatically computed using geoparsing and related information extraction technologies. Understanding location is a critical part of any historical research, and the nature of the collections makes them an interesting case study for testing automated methodologies for extracting content. The two projects (GeoDigRef and Embedding GeoCrossWalk) have looked at how automatic georeferencing of resources might be useful in developing improved geographical search capacities across collections. In this paper, we describe the work that was undertaken to configure the geoparser for the collections as well as the evaluations that were performed.

A History of Place in the Digital Age explores the history and impact of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and related digital mapping technologies in humanities research. Providing a historical and methodological discussion of place in the most important primary materials which make up the human record, including text and artefacts, the book explains how these materials frame, form and communicate location in the age of the internet. This leads in to a discussion of how the World Wide Web distorts and skews place, amplifying some voices and reducing others. Drawing on several connected case studies from the early modern period to the present day, the spatial writings of early modern antiquarians are explored, as are the roots of approaches to place in archaeology and philosophy. This forms the basis for a review of place online, through the complex history of the invention of the internet, in to the age of the interactive web and social media. By doing so, the book explores the key themes of spatial power and representation which these technologies frame. A History of Place in the Digital Age will be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners in a variety of humanities disciplines with an interest in understanding how technology can help them undertake research on spatial themes. It will be of interest as primary work to historians of technology, media and communications.

The application of e-Science technologies to disciplines in the arts and humanities raises major questions as to how those technologies can be most usefully exploited, what tools and infrastructures are needed for that exploitation, and what new research approaches can be generated. This paper reviews a number of activities in the UK and Europe in the last 5 years which have sought to address these questions through processes of experimentation and targeted infrastructure development. In the UK, the AHeSSC (Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre) has played a coordinating role for seven projects funded by the Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative. In Europe, DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) has sought to develop a deeper understanding of research information and communication in the arts and humanities, and to inform the development of e-infrastructures accordingly. Both sets of activity have indicated a common requirement: to construct a framework which consistently describes the methods and functions of scholarly activity which underlie digital arts and humanities research, and the relationships between them. Such a ‘methodological commons’ has been formulated in the field of the digital humanities. This paper describes the application of this approach to arts and humanities e-Science, with reference to the early work of DARIAH and AHeSSC.

Crowd-sourcing, the process of leveraging public participation in or contribution to a project or activity, is relatively new to academic research, but is becoming increasingly important as the Web transforms collaboration and communication and blurs the boundaries between the academic and non-academic worlds. At the same time, digital research methods are entering the mainstream of humanities research, and there are a number of initiatives addressing the conceptualisation and construction of research infrastructures for the humanities. This paper examines the place of crowd-sourcing activities within such initiatives, presenting a framework for describing and analysing academic humanities crowd-sourcing, and using this framework of ‘primitives’ as a basis for exploring potential relationships between crowd-sourcing and humanities research infrastructures.