Abstract:

The development of a georeferencing system based on the extraction of toponyms from an unpublished 17th century manuscript — known as Book of Properties — makes possible to explore it in a didactic context, not only for the study of the Portuguese language (and even Spanish, as it encompasses some places in Galicia), but especially for the geographic knowledge about the northern Portugal. The voluminous codex, which is about to be edited, describes in detail all the rural and urban properties of the Archbishops of Braga (Mesa Arcebispal de Braga), as well as all those that confront them, in an inventory carried out over five years by order of the king D. Filipe II of Portugal, III of Spain. Toponyms allow us to know the way in which each community has been individualizing and naming his space over time, in each season and region. The Book of Properties includes thousands of toponyms and microtoponyms whose extraction allows for the construction of a detailed map of the North of Portugal, also encompassing lands from Galicia and settlements from Porto to Santarém. These toponyms, including names of regions, cities, towns, villages, rivers, types of relief, and especially microtoponyms, such as those that name lands or properties, are an important source of geographic, historical, agricultural, sociocultural and linguistic knowledge, among others. They give account of much of what characterizes a people and his daily action, or micro-history, which often escapes the historian, centered on major events, and with a lack of sources of this type, as abundant as the Book of Properties. Over the past two years, we have been developing a computational tool specially oriented for storing and analysing the Book of Properties, with the aim of helping researchers, teachers and students to explore it in a simple way and with a modernized language, replacing the original method, which required the reading of the manuscript or its edition. In order to facilitate the analysis of this codex, we decided to incorporate an automatic annotation system, aimed at researching places, types of land and properties. We also created a base of georeferencing annotations for indexing the places referred directly or indirectly in the Book of Properties and carry out their automatic annotation. The developed annotation system is capable of associating a specified set of coordinates, georeferencing the annotations with a set of geographical coordinates of a given map, through the analysis of the texts stored in the system. A text georeferencing system can be defined in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a system that uses geoparsing techniques to describe the process of identifying names in texts, which is known by recognition of entities and their classification. In this work, we present the aforementioned tool, as well as describe its development and exploration processes, showing its practical utility in supporting the study of the numerous toponyms and microtononyms referred in the Book of Properties, thus reconstructing a great part of the map of Portugal, with more detail than other kind of maps. In fact, there are many pedagogical potentialities for the use of georeferencing for concrete knowledge of the names and types of places, their identification in loco and detailed characterization, which will make the acquisition of knowledge more focused on the student, starting to put that knowledge with a more effective and dynamic character.

Keywords:

Teaching and Global Research, Georeferencing Toponyms, Text and Vocabulary Conciliations, Corpus of Dictionaries, Textual and Document Stores.