In digital humanities projects, particularly for historical research and cultural heritage, GIS has played an increasingly important role. However, most implementations have concentrated on displays which ignore the temporal dimension or express it as multiple snapshots for fixed or periodic points in time. Our project concentrates on historical biography and expresses a biography as a sequence of life events with in time and space. We utilize named entity recognition and extraction to automatically mark up biographies so that they can be displayed as dynamic maps. In so doing, contextual features and related happenings and people can be overlaid to facilitate serendipitous discovery of unanticipated and seemingly unrelated connections. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.1 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Content Analysis xing ? abstracting methods, linguistic processing General Terms Experimentation Keywords Geographic search, Biographical text processing, Digital humanities....
Fredric C. Gey, Ryan Shaw, Ray R. Larson, Barry Pa