This document discusses a project called Exploring Place in the French of Italy (EPFOI) which analyzes French language works created in Italy between 1250-1500. It describes how the project collects data through optical character recognition, text mining, and geocoding locations. It then visualizes the data on interactive maps and an online exhibit. The document notes some difficulties with EPFOI's small corpus but how it allows for broader geographic trends and observations without intensive textual analysis of individual works.

1. Exploring Place in the French of Italy
Heather Hill
@HeatherVHill http://www.tinyurl.com/EPFOI2016

2. Exploring Place in the French of Italy (EPFOI)
French of Italy:
French-language works
created or copied on the
Italian peninsula from
roughly 1250-1500
@HeatherVHill

3. Data Collection
● Index - Place Names
● Geonames.org & Geohack (Wikipedia’s Gazatteer) - Coordinates
● ABBYY FineReader - OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
● AntConc - Text Mining
@HeatherVHill

4. Visualization
● Create maps on CartoDB
● Customized annotations, color, and
size of markers
On Omeka
● Profile
● Downloadable Data
● Micro Essays
Website
@HeatherVHill

5. Difficulties with EPFOI
and our solutions
@HeatherVHill

6. @HeatherVHill

7. Difficulties with EPFOI
and our solutions
@HeatherVHill

8. Mid-Range Reading
with EPFOI
@HeatherVHill
● Relatively small corpus
● Larger geographic trends
● Small-scale observations without intense
textual analysis

9. Mid-Range Reading
with EPFOI
@HeatherVHill
● Extracted strings of characters that indicated place
names
● Not looking closely at where the place names
occurred in the text, but where the text took place
● Acknowledges individual texts while stepping away
from the context within each one

10. Exploring Place in the French of Italy
Heather Hill
@ HeatherVHill http://www.tinyurl.com/EPFOI2016