Abstract
How do people refer to places in their environment, and to what extent do the underlying spatial concepts correspond to officially defined regions? We exemplify some types of evidence that may help to determine local vernacular place concepts. The output of latent semantic analysis (LSA) on a web-scraped text corpus was compared with mapping and linguistic data from a pilot experiment, to see how localities within the same geographic area tended to be clustered, how far the spatial geography is similarly distorted, and how far participants’ verbal protocols revealed a tendency to group places together (and how). Finally, we list some challenges for future triangulation of such data sources, in deriving vernacular place data.
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Notes
- 1.
LSA was adopted here because of Louwerse’s previous success, and because other methods tend to presume groupings of points exist from the start; we did not.
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Davies, C., Tenbrink, T. (2018). Place as Location Categories: Learning from Language. In: Fogliaroni, P., Ballatore, A., Clementini, E. (eds) Proceedings of Workshops and Posters at the 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2017). COSIT 2017. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63946-8_37
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