Stuart Dunn mentioned the Victoria County History in his writeup of discussions with the Clergy of the Church of England Database project. Both resources are rich in place-name mentions and historic depth; as part of the Chalice project we’re investigating ways to make such resources more searchable by extracting historic place-names and linking them to our gazetteer.

Here’s a summary of some email conversation between Stuart, Claire Grover, Ross Drew at EDINA and myself while looking at some sample data from VCH.

The idea is to explore the possibilities in how Chalice data could enhance / complement semi-structured information like VCH (or more structured database-like sources such as CCED).

It would be very valuable, I think, to do an analysis of how much effort and preparation of the (target) data is needed to link CHALICE to VCH, and a more structured dataset like CCED. By providing georeferences and toponym links, we’re bringing all that EPNS documentary evidence to VCH, thus enriching it.

It would be very interesting if we were able to show how text-mining techniques could be used to add to the work of EPNS (extracting place references that aren’t listed, and suggesting them to editors along with suggested attestations (source and date).

In the more immediate future; this is about adding links to Chalice place-references to other resources, that would allow us to cross-reference them and search them in interesting ways.

Text mining isn’t absolutely necessary to map the EPNS place names to the VCH text. On the other hand, LTG have all the processing infrastructure to convert formats, tokenise the text etc. so we could put something in place very quickly. It wouldn’t be perfect but it would demonstrate the point. I’ve not seen the CCED data, so don’t know how complex that would be.

Here’s a sample reference to a volume of VCH that may have some overlap with the Shropshire content we have in “born-digital” form from EPNS. There’s the intriguing prospect of adding historic place-name text mining/search in at the digitisation phase, so resources can be linked to other references as soon as they’re published.