Historical geocoding assistant

Abstract

The growing use of geographic information systems (GIS) and geographical analyses in different areas of the digital humanities highlights the need for geocoding, i.e. assigning geographic coordinates to records in a dataset. Such spatially-referenced datasets are a precondition for any spatial analysis and visualization. While GIS in general is a dynamically evolving branch of software development, there is a need for specialized applications which would assist researchers in geocoding datasets in history, archaeology, and the digital humanities. Therefore, we developed the “Historical Geocoding Assistant”, an open-source web tool that meets the specific needs of historical research and brings a solution to geocoding historical data in a convenient, fast, and reliable way.

Keywords

• Geocoding
• GIS
• Historical data
• Gazetteer
• Web-based application