Creating a gazetteer of place names on old Japanese topographical maps using MapKurator

Keywords: place names, mapKurator, old topographic map, Japan
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In recent years, the rapid spread of digital humanities has led to the spatialization of the humanities, and the formation of what is called spatial humanities or geo-humanities. This is due to the accelerated digitization of old maps, photographs, films, books, etc., and the construction and publication of various digital archives.
The key to digitizing and linking this geographical information from the past is place names, and the method used is called geocoding. Geocoding requires a geocoder, which is a gazetteer that maps place names to latitude and longitude.
In Japan, place name dictionaries are currently being made public from open data provided by the national government and local governments, and place name dictionaries and APIs are being made public by private map companies.
However, in order to create a historical place name dictionary, it is necessary to refer to place names on old maps. Recently, mapKurator, which uses AI technology to automatically extract place names from old maps and assign latitude and longitude, has been developed as open source (Chiang et al. 2023). In this paper, we use mapKurator to create a place name dictionary for 1:50,000 old topographic maps created by the Imperial Japanese Army before World War II.