Abstract
How do people refer to places in their environment, and to what extent do the underlying spatial concepts correspond to officially defined regions? We exemplify some types of evidence that may help to determine local vernacular place concepts. The output of LSA on a web-scraped text corpus was compared with mapping and linguistic data from a pilot experiment, to see how localities within the same geographic area tended to be clustered, how far the spatial geog-raphy is similarly distorted, and how far participants’ verbal protocols revealed a tendency to group places together (and how). Finally, we list some challenges for future triangulation of such data sources, in deriving vernacular place data.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of Workshops and Posters at the 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2017) |
| Place of Publication | Cham |
| Pages | 217-225 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9783319639468 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2018 |
Keywords
- Place
- Vernacular geography
- Latent semantic analysis (LSA)
- Spatial cognition
- Spatial language
- Regions
- Categorical reasoning