Mapping the Past: Geographically Linking an Early 20th Century Swedish Encyclopedia with Wikidata

TL;DR

This paper extracts and links geographic entries from a 20th-century Swedish encyclopedia to Wikidata, revealing historical geographic distributions and entry selection patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a method for extracting, categorizing, and geographically linking encyclopedia entries to Wikidata, enabling historical geographic analysis.

Findings

Higher density of locations in Sweden, Germany, UK

Approximately 22% of entries are locations

Nearly 18,000 valid geographic coordinates extracted

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the extraction of all the location entries from a prominent Swedish encyclopedia from the early 20th century, the \textit{Nordisk Familjebok} `Nordic Family Book.' We focused on the second edition called \textit{Uggleupplagan}, which comprises 38 volumes and over 182,000 articles. This makes it one of the most extensive Swedish encyclopedias. Using a classifier, we first determined the category of the entries. We found that approximately 22 percent of them were locations. We applied a named entity recognition to these entries and we linked them to Wikidata. Wikidata enabled us to extract their precise geographic locations resulting in almost 18,000 valid coordinates. We then analyzed the distribution of these locations and the entry selection process. It showed a higher density within Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The paper sheds light on the selection and representation of geographic information in the \textit{Nordisk Familjebok}, providing insights into historical and societal perspectives. It also paves the way for future investigations into entry selection in different time periods and comparative analyses among various encyclopedias.