Place names in Spanish Republican Life Stories: spatial patterns in locations and perceptions

Abstract. Places can be defined by different features including geographical coordinates, landscape elements and also subjective information like perception. The corpus collected by the Réseau des acteurs de l’histoire et la mémoire de l’immigration (RAHMI) contains oral interviews about Spanish Republicans journeys during Spanish Civil War and World War II. These life stories quote place names corresponding to proper name (Npr) or common name (Nc) and which can be qualified or associated to non-geographical nouns, adjectives and expressions. Methods from natural language processing have been used to automatically extract and characterize these pieces of informations into annotations. The objective of the presented work is to analyse the geographical aspects of places and associated features, and to propose cartographical displays illustrating life stories and supporting analysis. Distribution of quoted Npr place names was first studied. It enabled targeting relevant spatial scales and so mapping extents for the corpus. Second, features of Npr places about their type (administrative, topographic) and their spatial target based on assocations with Nc have been synthetized. Then perception were allocated to Npr, falling into the three values of polarity positive, negative or neutral. Spatial patterns of each value have been displayed and interpreted. Summary of the annotations, analysis and created maps offer insights into the corpus driven by the mentioned places. Based on individual testimonies, it may help further interpretation and researches about this historical period.