Geographical data mining, modelling and mapping

We are working to build a detailed gazetteer covering the people and places in EE. Thanks to an agreement with the Getty Research Institute we have been able to use the Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Names (TGN) as the basis of our taxonomy.

Our Gazetteer, which was made available in November 2011, includes over 3,000 locations across 50 countries in 5 continents.

We have already included over 1,000 locations not listed in the Getty TGN, and as part of our research effort we will be feeding these back to be incorporated into their database.

The first phase of the project looked at source locations of letters, and EE has successfully identified and connected source locations to over 32,000 letters. Research is already underway to link recipient location information too. Concurrently with letter location research we are working to connect the birth and death locations of correspondents in EE.

As well as the detailed hierarchical Gazetteer we have begun adding historical maps to the location pages. At present these cover individual countries though as we progress through the project we will be including ones of narrower regions.