Patricia Murrieta-Flores

Entendiendo la movilidad humana mediante tecnologías espaciales: el papel de las áreas naturales de tránsito en el Suroeste de la Península Ibérica durante la Prehistoria Reciente

1) Archaeological, historical, and ethnographic research has demonstrated how mountainous environments infl uence the socio-cultural dynamics of the communities that live in them and in their neighbouring areas. The development of these communities tends to occur at the margins, often far away from centres of political power. This marginality is also extended to movement in these regions, where mountain ranges regularly constitute mighty obstacles on account of their natural confi guration which plays a central role in strategy, commerce and travelling. In the case of western Sierra Morena in Spain, its constitution shaped both the ways of transit through the mountains during Later Prehistory and the historical routes of communication that traverse Andalucía. Using a GIS methodology developed specifi cally to identify particular characteristics of the landscape relevant to human movement, such as passageways, crossing points, and natural areas of transit, we examine the role that natural accessibility had for the late prehistoric societies of this region. We conclude that the location of their habitats and symbolic places are strongly related to corridors, possibly due to an increasing importance of herding activities.

Automatically Analyzing Large Texts in a GIS Environment: The Registrar General's Reports and Cholera in the 19th Century

The aim of this article is to present new research showcasing how Geographic Information Systems in combination with Natural Language Processing and Corpus Linguistics methods can offer innovative venues of research to analyze large textual collections in the Humanities, particularly in historical research. Using as examples parts of the collection of the Registrar Generals Reports that contain more than 200,000 pages of descriptions, census data and vital statistics for the UK, we introduce newly developed automated textual tools and well known spatial analyses used in combination to investigate a case study of the references made to cholera and other diseases in these historical sources, and their relationship to place-names during Victorian times. The integration of such techniques has allowed us to explore, in an automatic way, this historical source containing millions of words, to examine the geographies depicted in it, and to identify textual and geographic patterns in the corpus.

Learning to combine multiple string similarity metrics for effective toponym matching

ABSTRACT Several tasks related to geographical information retrieval and to the geographical information sciences involve toponym matching, that is, the problem of matching place names that share a common referent. In this article, we present the results of a wide-ranging evaluation on the performance of different string similarity metrics over the toponym matching task. We also report on experiments involving the usage of supervised machine learning for combining multiple similarity metrics, which has the natural advantage of avoiding the manual tuning of similarity thresholds. Experiments with a very large dataset show that the performance differences for the individual similarity metrics are relatively small, and that carefully tuning the similarity threshold is important for achieving good results. The methods based on supervised machine learning, particularly when considering ensembles of decision trees, can achieve good results on this task, significantly outperforming the individual similarity metrics.

Further frontiers in GIS : extending spatial analysis to textual sources in archaeology

Abstract Although the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has a long history in archaeology, spatial technologies have been rarely used to analyse the content of textual collections. A newly developed approach termed Geographic Text Analysis (GTA) is now allowing the semi-automated exploration of large corpora incorporating a combination of Natural Language Processing techniques, Corpus Linguistics, and GIS. In this article we explain the development of GTA, propose possible uses of this methodology in the field of archaeology, and give a summary of the challenges that emerge from this type of analysis.

Mapping ‘Wordsworthshire’ : a GIS study of literary tourism in Victorian Lakeland

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Victorian Culture on 14/08/2015, available online: doi: 10.1080/13555502.2015.1058089

Toponym matching through deep neural networks

ABSTRACT Toponym matching, i.e. pairing strings that represent the same real-world location, is a fundamental problemfor several practical applications. The current state-of-the-art relies on string similarity metrics, either specifically developed for matching place names or integrated within methods that combine multiple metrics. However, these methods all rely on common sub-strings in order to establish similarity, and they do not effectively capture the character replacements involved in toponym changes due to transliterations or to changes in language and culture over time. In this article, we present a novel matching approach, leveraging a deep neural network to classify pairs of toponyms as either matching or nonmatching. The proposed network architecture uses recurrent nodes to build representations from the sequences of bytes that correspond to the strings that are to be matched. These representations are then combined and passed to feed-forward nodes, finally leading to a classification decision. We present the results of a wide-ranging evaluation on the performance of the proposed method, using a large dataset collected from the GeoNames gazetteer. These results show that the proposed method can significantly outperform individual similarity metrics from previous studies, as well as previous methods based on supervised machine learning for combining multiple metrics.

Developing computational approaches for the study of movement: assessing the role of visibility and landscape markers in terrestrial navigation during Iberian Late Prehistory

The topic of movement in archaeology has been extensively studied. Research on human movement during prehistory has become in archaeology and anthropology one of the bases for understanding the dynamics of social and economic relationships, technology, social identity and territoriality, among many other important themes. Although archaeological investigations related to movement have increased in the last decade, the majority have usually relied on “static” evidence, that is, on the analysis of the materials or objects that are found in specific sites, establishing the relationship between them and their points of origin or destination (Branting 2004). In recent years, using spatial technologies, more research has aimed to investigate movement from a landscape perspective, in which more attention has been paid to the processes that may have happened on journeys. Some of these studies have directly or indirectly analysed the possible factors influencing the decisions about which paths to take, the mechanics of movement and the archaeological evidence related to it (Llobera 2000; Fairen Jimenez 2004; Cruz Berrocal 2004; Fabrega Alvarez 2006; Fabrega Alvarez / Parcero Oubina 2007; Llobera / Slukin 2007; Fiz / Orengo 2008; Murrieta-Flores 2010, 2012a; Mlekuž 2010; in the current volume, Lock et al. and Mlekuž among others). In the specific case of Iberia, megalithic monuments are among the archaeological elements at a landscape scale that have been linked to potential patterns of movement, and it has been argued that, besides their symbolic and funerary meanings, they may also have been utilized as landscape markers. The idea of prehistoric monuments as markers can be traced in archaeology to the 1970s with the adoption of Saxe’s (1970) Hypothesis No. 8 by researchers like Fleming (1973), Renfrew (1976) and Chapman (1981). These authors proposed that megalithic monuments may have been used as markers with territorial connotations. Nonetheless, due to the physical and spatial characteristics of the monuments, other hypotheses have also arisen, especially in Iberian archaeology. These theories have pointed out that megalithic monuments were not only an important element structuring prehistoric landscapes, but also that they tend to sustain spatial relationships with historical pathways. This has

Placing the Pillar of Eliseg: Movement, Visibility and Memory in the Early Medieval Landscape

THE LANDSCAPE CONTEXT of the early 9th-century monument known as the Pillar of Eliseg is interrogated here for the first time with GIS-based analysis and innovative spatial methodologies. Our interpretation aims to move beyond regarding the Pillar as a prominent example of early medieval monument reuse and a probable early medieval assembly site. We argue that the location and topographical context of the cross and mound facilitated the monument’s significance as an early medieval locus of power, faith and commemoration in a contested frontier zone. The specific choice of location is shown to relate to patterns of movement and visibility that may have facilitated and enhanced the ceremonial and commemorative roles of the monument. By shedding new light on the interpretation of the Pillar of Eliseg as a node of social and religious aggregation and ideological power, our study has theoretical and methodological implications for studying the landscape contexts of early medieval stone monuments.

Towards the Spatial Analysis of Vague and Imaginary Place and Space: Evolving the Spatial Humanities through Medieval Romance

The success so far of Spatial Humanities as a field can be summarized in the increasing amount of research and publications engaging with the exploration of geographies in literary and historical t...

Geohumanities 2017 workshop report

This article reports on the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, held in conjunction with the 25th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. The article outlines the objectives of the workshop, and briefly describes the technical program.