De bello Gallico – a pipeline for automatic geo-annotation

This study presents an automated pipeline for geo-annotating classical Latin literary texts, specifically applied to Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico. While geographical annotation has gained importance in digital humanities through the "geospatial turn," its application to Latin literary studies remains limited due to its dependence on manual processes. We address this gap by integrating LatinCy's named entity recognition capabilities with the Pleiades database to create a pipeline for geo-annotation.
Our pipeline processes the Latin text to extract geographical entities, matches them with Pleiades entries, and produces a token-level CSV edition enriched with spatial metadata including URIs, coordinates, and precision indicators.
Evaluation against the Trismegistos gold standard reveals that LatinCy identifies 616 locations compared to 1964 in the reference dataset, with discrepancies primarily attributable to different definitional scopes of "place" and LatinCy's limitation to single-word entities. Database matching analysis shows that only 27.4% of unique locations successfully match Pleiades entries with complete geographical data, while 71.1% remain unmatched.
Despite these limitations, the pipeline demonstrates the feasibility of automated geo-annotation for classical texts and provides a foundation for creating interactive educational resources and enabling spatial analysis of ancient literature.