Exploring Historical Links between Scotland and India using Geoparsing

A significant amount of spatial information can be derived from unstructured datasets available in web pages, e-books, and digital archives. Geoparsing is one such concept that is very useful in extracting spatial data from any unstructured text source. Geoparsing complemented with Natural Language Processing algorithms can effectively automate this process of identifying and geo-tagging the extracted spatial data. The research illustrates the power of geoparsing by extracting place names from a corpus of biographies of famous Scots who travelled to India from the 18 th to the early 20 th Century to give an impression of the spread of the Scottish diaspora at that time.