Kolloquium Geoinformatik Enhancing IR by Adding Geographical Information: Text- and Geo-based Search within a Corpus of Literary Texts

The eHumanitites Project GeoBib aims at building a georeferenced online bibliography of early Holocaust Literature (1933-1949). It includes Information on texts (bibliographical data) and on authors (biographical data). Furthermore, the places occurring in the texts are annotated and georeferenced. The planned website will provide means to search for persons, places, and texts. Texts, their authors and the places connected with persons and texts will be combined. This enables the user to find texts not only by defining restrictions on bibliographical information but also on the author’s biographical data. Since both texts and authors are georeferenced, spatial searches are possible: One will be able to find all texts containing reports on, e.g., Auschwitz, or all texts that take place around Berlin or all texts by authors from Heidelberg. This talk will show how the geo-data enhances the possibilities of IR in this Digital Humanities project and how georeferencing enables peoples to conduct new research in the humanities. Furthermore, the combination of text- and geo-based search queries will be explained.