Keiji YANO, Geography Department, Ritsumeikan University, Japan
Mikiharu TAKEUCHI, Geography Department, Ritsumeikan University, Japan
Ryo KAMATA, Geography Department, Ritsumeikan University, Japan
The purpose of this research is to develop a "GIS-based Place Name Dictionary", which is a place name dictionary (Gazetteer) that can retrieve geospatial information from various parts of Japan, from historical names in the past to current place names and addresses, as well as identify and represent them on a map. Areal statistics and historical documents used in the humanities and social sciences often contain place names and addresses, which are geospatial information that indicates spatial location, in addition to changes in names over time. By identifying a place by its name or address and visualizing various phenomena that occurred at that point in the past on a map, we can clarify the spatial location of those phenomena, and by overlapping them with other maps, we can discover new knowledge in fields such as literature, history, sociology, and economics, where spatial perspectives have not been sufficiently incorporated.
In addition, in recent years, the field called Digital Humanities (DH) has been expanding in Europe and the United States, and new knowledge is being discovered from large-scale digitized academic data through data-driven machine analysis that could not be achieved through conventional humanities research using manual labor. For example, if travel diaries from the Edo period are digitized, reprinted, and converted into text, it will be possible to easily map the places visited on a trip with the "GIS-based Place Name Dictionary" constructed in this research. Furthermore, by overlaying the locations of place names in ancient documents related to historical disasters with current hazard maps, it will be possible to estimate disaster risks from historical place names of the past. Such research is positioned in the historical GIS and Spatial Humanities, which deals with spatial perspectives in DH research, and is expected to create new knowledge by utilizing the integrated knowledge in the humanities and social sciences.
Mots clés : Place names|Gazetteer|GIS|Japan|Digital Humanities
A104154KY