Placing multi-modal, and multi-lingual Data in the Humanities Domain on the Map: the Mythotopia Geo-tagged Corpus

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 2856–2864 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 2856 Placing multi-modal, and multi-lingual Data in the Humanities Domain on the Map: The Mythotopia Geotagged Corpus Voula Giouli, Anna Vacalopoulou, Nikolaos Sidiropoulos, Christina Flouda, Athanasios Doupas, Giorgos Giannopoulos, Nikos Bikakis, Vassilis Kaffes, Gregory Stainhaouer ATHENA Research and Innovation Centre Artemidos 6 & Epidavrou, Maroussi, Greece {voula, avacalop, nsidir, cflouda, adoupas, giann, bikakis, vkaffes, stein}@athenarc.gr Abstract The paper gives an account of an infrastructure that will be integrated into a platform aimed at providing a multi-faceted experience to visitors of Northern Greece using mythology as a starting point. This infrastructure comprises a multi-lingual and multi-modal corpus (i.e., a corpus of textual data supplemented with images and video) that belongs to the humanities domain along with a dedicated database (content management system) with advanced indexing, linking, and search functionalities. We will present the corpus itself focusing on the content, the methodology adopted for its development, and the steps taken towards rendering it accessible via the database in a way that also facilitates useful visualizations. In this context, we tried to address three main challenges: (a) to add a novel annotation layer, namely geotagging, (b) to ensure the long-term maintenance of and accessibility to the highly heterogeneous primary data – even after the life cycle of the current project – by adopting a metadata schema that is compatible to existing standards; and (c) to render the corpus a useful resource to scholarly research in the digital humanities by adding a minimum set of linguistic annotations. Keywords: cultural heritage and humanities corpus, cross-media indexing, geo-tagging benchmark. 1. Introduction The quest for digital resources in the humanities domain brings about the notion of representation and organization of the data at hand that will allow not only for the efficient indexing and retrieval of the digital content, but also for providing meaningful visualizations. Lately, adding accurate geographical information that is relevant to the content of texts, images, or videos has become of paramount importance not only to applications that seek to address the so-called placing task, but also to tools aimed at visualizing the spatial features of texts. When performed manually, geotagging is a costly and time-consuming endeavour. To overcome this obstacle, tools for geotagging are required, that is, tools to automatically disambiguate names of localities, identify locations and geotag texts, images, audio, or video. In this regard, there is a need for hand-crafted quality datasets that are applicable for training and evaluating purposes. The work presented here seeks to address this issue by creating a corpus resource that spans across various modalities, languages, and domains and its multi-layer processing by adding metadata – including spatial information. The paper is outlined as follows: in section (2) we present the rationale behind corpus creation and the general outline of the project; previous work in developing corpora in the humanities domain and in developing geotagged datasets is summarised in (3). …

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