Editors’ Summary: This post addresses the potential value of examining co-occurrences between different types of named entities, in particular locations and people. Limiting analysis to spatial entities misses an opportunity to reflect how historical figures interacted with them. By integrating NER with co-occurrence analysis, this post shows how we can reach more meaningful NER results by combining both spatial entities and personal names. This way, researchers could graph human interactions among historical locations. This post acts as a helpful reminder that we should not treat “named entities” as one topic of research. There are many specific branches of “named entities,” such as spatial entities, personal entities, temporal entities, etc. Using NER without distinguishing its specific category of entities risks over-generalizing the research conclusion.
Editors’ Choice: From Coordinates to Connections: Mapping People and Places in Ottoman Turkish Texts
