Event Gazetteers and Timelines for

Accessing Culture and History

Bob Allen

College of Information Studies

U. Maryland

Historical Newspaper Collections

• Large quantity of highly relevant information– 3000 titles just in Maryland

• Many research topics– Storage/Networking– OCR research– Metadata– Interface and interaction– Extend to multimedia (radio/TV)

Event Gazetteers and Event Servers

• Model is spatial gazetteers – Alexandria GIS project

• Event structures– Dates– Location – GIS– Agent

• Issues– Vague event specification– Metadata standards

Relationships among Events

• Timelines– Collecting and showing events– A model for nesting events within events– Annotations to describe the relationships

• Sharing, collaboration, and versioning– Many viewpoints on events– Creation communities

Causality

State model of qualitative causation

State1 State2

Causal State

Cognitive organizers for science texts

Casual grids

Narrative

• Plot units – (Flow of physical states + mental states)

Community HistoriesEducational Implications– Scalable– Self-organizing and local– Viewing local events in national context