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UID:pretalx-spathum24-9WPEFZ@pretalx.com
DTSTART;TZID=CET:20240927T100000
DTEND;TZID=CET:20240927T103000
DESCRIPTION:Ancient civilizations in the Middle East overlapped in time and
  space with others. Many of their writings are originally unstructured tex
 t in ancient languages or ancient dialects of modern languages. Thus\, hum
 anities scholars studying these civilizations are required to specialize i
 n one or a few of these languages\, causing them to be siloed from other r
 esearchers and limited to these sources. Recent efforts in extracting info
 rmation from historical scripts into place names (toponym) and people name
 s databases (prosopographies) have followed this pattern\, focusing on one
  civilization or even one scholar. For example\, the Syriaca project (Gibs
 on et al. 2017) presents a comprehensive gazetteer extracted from sources 
 in the Syriac language. If we wish to allow scholars to interact with the 
 works of others and integrate it with their own\, we need a common databas
 e. A prominent example of such an initiative to create a common database i
 s the World Historical Gazetteer (WHG\, Grossner and Mostern\, 2021)\, whi
 ch allows researchers to upload their toponyms to a common repository. How
 ever\, beyond being able to link their data to wikidata\, the WHG does not
  provide a means to link one scholar’s work to another. \nThe Middle Eas
 t Heritage Data Integration Endeavor (MEHDIE\, Rusinek et al.\, 2023) is a
  project aiming to create language-aware spatial data integration tools fo
 r the alignment and matching of datasets created from different historical
  sources and for different purposes. We use several approaches to perform 
 the matching. A syntactic approach augments known name variants with trans
 literated variants to other semitic languages to perform syntactic compari
 son between variant pairs in the same script type. A phonetic approach con
 verts the toponym titles to their International Phonetic alphabet represen
 tation. A machine-learning approach utilizes a shared embedding space crea
 ted for the languages and scripts in the Middle East allowing a semantic c
 omparison between the meanings of the names. Finally\, a graph-based appro
 ach utilizes related places to assess similarity. Related places are those
  whose distance or hierarchical relation to a place is known. We perform g
 raph-learning over the created place-relations graph to calculate similari
 ty between the sub-graphs. \nThe tool itself is publicly available to huma
 nities scholars to use and attempt to match their own data with that of ot
 her scholars. We can extend the tool to handle other language families and
  hope to pursue such extensions in the near future. Figure 1 shows an exam
 ple of the tool’s interface that allows the user to see a place (Dendara
 \, in modern day Egypt)  on the map and a navigable related-place graph fo
 r all the places that have been found to be related to this place by our m
 atching tool and through external referencing. \n\nFigure 1: an example fr
 om the MEHDIE tool: Dendara in the Kima dataset matched to places from oth
 er datasets. \n\nUsing the MEHDIE tool and hopping between the map and the
  linked place identities\, historians and other humanities researchers can
  enrich their knowledge with related information. For example (Figure 2)\,
  a historian who studies the history of the coast of Arabia in the persian
  gulf can now enrich the military and cultural information she receives fr
 om reading Yaqut Al-Hamawi (A Muslim geographer)  about the Qatif oasis\, 
 with new information about the pearl industry there\, provided by Benjamin
  of Tudela (a medieval Jewish traveler). The scholar of Jewish history\, o
 n the other hand\, may follow the graph from Qatif to its geographic paren
 t\, and learn from Yaqut about the history of Jews in the Caliphate countr
 y of Bahrain.\n\n\nFigure 2: an example from the MEHDIE tool: ‘Katifa’
  in Benjamin of Tudela on the left\, matched with ‘Al-Qatif’ from Yaqu
 t Al-Hamawi\, on the right\, with a graph visualizing their match and the 
 relation of Qatif to Bahrain.\n\nKeywords: Data Integration\, Multi-lingua
 l\, Toponyms\, .\n\n\nReferences\nGibson\, Nathan P.\, David A. Michelson\
 , and Daniel L. Schwartz. "From manuscript catalogues to a handbook of Syr
 iac literature: Modeling an infrastructure for Syriaca. org." Journal of D
 ata Mining & Digital Humanities (2017).\nGrossner\, Karl\, and Ruth Moster
 n. "Linked places in world historical gazetteer." Proceedings of the 5th A
 CM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities. 2021.\nRusi
 nek\, Sinai\, Tomer Sagi\, Moran Zaga\, Efraim Lev\, and Moshe Lavee. "MEH
 DIE: The Middle East Data Integration Endeavour." Digital Humanities 2023:
  Book of Abstracts\, edited by Anne Baillot\, Toma Tasovac\, Walter Scholg
 er\, and Georg Vogeler\, Zenodo\, 2023\, pp. 551-552. https://doi.org/10.5
 281/zenodo.7961821
DTSTAMP:20260618T115321Z
LOCATION:MG1/02.05
SUMMARY:MEHDIE - Data Integration Tools for Spatial Humanities in the Middl
 e East - Tomer Sagi\, Sinai Rusinek
URL:https://pretalx.com/spathum24/talk/9WPEFZ/
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