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To do justice to the legacy of Alexander von Humboldt, a 19th century German scientist and explorer an information and knowledge management system is required to preserve the author’s original intent and promote an awareness of all his relevant works. Although all of Humboldt's works can be found on the internet as digitized papers, the complexity and internal interconnectivity of the writings is not very transparent. Humboldt's concepts of interaction cannot be adequately represented only by digitized papers or scanned documents.
The Humboldt Portal is an attempt to create a new generation of digital libraries, providing a new form of interaction and synthesis between humanistic texts and scientific observation. The digital version of his documents supplies dynamic links to sources, maps, images, graphs and relevant texts in accordance with his visions, because “everything is interconnectedness”.
Automatic Identification of Travel Locations in Rare Books - Object Oriented Information Management
(2017)
The digital content of the Internet is growing exponentially and mass digitization of printed media opens access to literature, in particular the genre of travel literature from the 18th and 19th century, which consists of diaries or travel books describing routes, observations or inspirations. The identification of described locations in the digital text is a long-standing challenge which requires information technology to supply dynamic links to sources by new forms of interaction and synthesis between humanistic texts and scientific observations.
Using object oriented information technology, a prototype of a software tool is developed which makes it possible to automatically identify geographic locations and travel routes mentioned in rare books. The information objects contain properties such as names and classification codes for populated places, streams, mountains and regions. Together, with the latitudes and longitudes of every single location, it is possible to geo-reference this information in order that all processed and filtered datasets can be displayed by a map application. This method has already been used in the Humboldt Digital Library to present Alexander von Humboldt’s maps and was tested in a case study to prove the correctness and reliability of the automatic identification of locations based on the work of Alexander von Humboldt and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
The results reveal numerous errors due to misspellings, change of location names, equality of terms and location names. But on the other hand it becomes very clear that results of the automatic object detection and recognition can be improved by error-free and comprehensive sources. As a result an increase in quality and usability of the service can be expected, accompanied by more options to detect unknown locations in the descriptions of rare books.
In the 19th century Alexander von Humboldt explored the nature and was conceived a new vision of nature that still influences the way we understand the new world. Humboldt believed in the importance of accurate measurements and precise description of observations. His vision of nature included not only facts but also emotions.
Nowadays smart solutions will be developed by using computer technology, which will influence our relationship to nature, our handling of the complexity and diversity of nature itself and the technological influences on the society. Could we avoid a new form of “Colonialism”, when a network of super computers will create a smarter world?