The world through the eyes of an educated person in Minusinsk of the late XIX - early XX centuries: distribution of the frequency of geographical names in the books of the Minusinsk Public Library

• Published in: Историческая информатика no. 1; pp. 174 - 189
• Main Authors: Mekhovskii, Vadim Aleksandrovich, Kizhner, Inna Aleksandrovna
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.01.2025
• ISSN: 2585-7797; 2585-7797
• DOI: 10.7256/2585-7797.2025.1.72586

The subject of the study is the corpus of children's literature from the collection of the Minusinsk Public Library of the late XIX – early XX century, consisting of 121 works written between 1719 and 1905. These texts are a significant source for studying the formation of geographical perception among residents of a provincial Siberian city through fiction. Special attention is paid to the analysis of geographical names (toponyms) found in texts in order to identify their frequency and geographical distribution. This allows us to reconstruct the picture of the world presented in the books of that time and understand how it was perceived by the children's audience, forming their idea of countries, cities and cultural centers. The research is aimed at studying the role of children's literature as a cultural tool that reflects and forms geographical representations, as well as at identifying methodological challenges and limitations when working with historical buildings. The methodological basis includes bringing pre-reform texts to a machine-readable form using digitization tools and geoparsing to automatically identify geographical entities. The Spacy library was used for the analysis, followed by manual verification and correction of the data. The results of the study include the identification of 668 cities and 97 countries represented in the texts, as well as the construction of a cartographic visualization of the frequency distribution of mentions. The analysis revealed an uneven distribution of geographical names in various texts, where mentions of Russia, Poland and England prevail among countries, and Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg among cities. The scope of the results includes research in the field of digital humanities, library science and historical and cultural studies. The novelty of the work lies in the use of modern geoparsing methods for processing Russian-language texts of pre-reform spelling and in the analysis of the previously unexplored literature corpus of the Minusinsk Library. The conclusions emphasize the importance of text mapping for understanding the formation of geographical perception and the need for further development of NER tools for complex corpora. Despite the limitations, the research contributes to the development of NLP methods for historical texts.