@inproceedings{ahlin-etal-2024-mapping,
    title = "Mapping the Past: Geographically Linking an Early 20th Century {S}wedish Encyclopedia with {W}ikidata",
    author = "Ahlin, Axel  and
      Myrne Bl{\aa}der, Alfred  and
      Nugues, Pierre",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.962",
    pages = "11040--11048",
    abstract = "In this paper, we describe the extraction of all the location entries from a prominent Swedish encyclopedia from the early 20th century, the Nordisk Familjebok {`}Nordic Family Book{'}, focusing on the second edition called Uggleupplagan. This edition comprises 38 volumes and over 182,000 articles, making it one of the most extensive Swedish encyclopedia editions. Using a classifier, we first determined the category of the entities. We found that approximately 22 percent of the encyclopedia entries 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 concentration within Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The paper sheds light on the selection and representation of geographic information in the 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.",
}

In this paper, we describe the extraction of all the location entries from a prominent Swedish encyclopedia from the early 20th century, the Nordisk Familjebok {`}Nordic Family Book{'}, focusing on the second edition called Uggleupplagan. This edition comprises 38 volumes and over 182,000 articles, making it one of the most extensive Swedish encyclopedia editions. Using a classifier, we first determined the category of the entities. We found that approximately 22 percent of the encyclopedia entries 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 concentration within Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The paper sheds light on the selection and representation of geographic information in the 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.
Ahlin, Axel Myrne Bl{\aa}der, Alfred Nugues, Pierre
Mapping the Past: Geographically Linking an Early 20th Century Swedish Encyclopedia with Wikidata