Algumas intersecções disciplinares na recuperação da geografia da Peregrinação de Fernão Mendes Pinto

Abstract

There have been different interdisciplinary approaches to recreating the routes and locations in Fernão Mendes Pinto’s travels. Until now, none has been able to provide a georeference for all the areas involved. In this article we combine techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to produce an index of geographically named entities. After careful comparative analysis of specialized works, mainly from the domain of history and historical geography, our index provides an exact georeference for all locations that were previously known and show no contradiction with Pinto’s description. For the rest, we build an initial model that solves a relative georeference where every single entity is assigned a geographical feature and is linked to a holonym as a part to which it belongs. The resulting taxonomy is further processed as an ontology and stored along with additional data from corpus analysis in a relational database. We illustrate methods and results with examples, describe the final products, and conclude more interdisciplinary analysis is required to further develop the relative georeferences.

KEYWORDS: Fernão Mendes Pinto, georeferencing, geographical named entities, historical geography, text mining.