NSF Grant Awarded to Professor Zephyr Frank

Professor Zephyr Frank has received a 3-year National Science Foundation grant to explore and enhance how Geographical Information Systems and related digital tools identify, analyze and visualize qualitative and quantitative spatial information. The international project team, comprised of historians, data scientists, and cartographers, examine places that are described in archival texts (such as poetry, oral histories) and construct spatial representations of these textual geographies in the form of maps and visualizations. The researchers utilize natural language processing  techniques and qualitative spatial & temporal reasoning in order to extract, locate, and contextualize imprecise information about places, which can subsequently be explored with advanced visual analytics and representation to test and communicate results. Focusing on the poetic landscape depictions of England’s Lake District and the survivor testimonies from the U.S. Holocaust Museum, the team aims to show not only where a place/event is located but also what it might feel like to be there and what it meant to particular historical actors.

Click here for detailed project information.