Grimoire for the Digital Humanities:
The Forbidden Atlas
5. My Marvellous Melbourne Podcast Locator Spell
Authors: Dr Mitchell Harrop, Kim Doyle
My Marvellous Melbourne (MyMarvellousMelbourne.net.au) is a podcast produced by staff and students affiliated with the Melbourne History Workshop (MelbourneHistoryWorkshop.com) in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, under the direction of Professor Andrew May:
“[...] Our segments combine stories, interviews, personal reflections and memories that interest and inspire us about the social history of the city and suburbs. My Marvellous Melbourne draws on and adds to the resources of the online eMelbourne project. Favourite places, food and leisure, the city of the senses, sources and resources, exhibitions, environmental issues, archaeological sites—there is something for everyone in our selection of stories about the people, processes and institutions that make up the rich history of Melbourne. [...]”
This chapter uses computational text processing techniques on Melbourne History Workshop’s My Marvellous Melbourne podcast transcripts. The techniques auto-magically extract the places mentioned in the podcast so that ultimately they can be presented on a map. The approach presented in this chapter can be applied to other textual data to create similar maps.
The map output is a chance for Melbourne History Workshop podcasters to reflect on the spatial coverage of episodes over the release of episodes and to create an engaging visualisation to spark interest in the segments. It’s also a very simple and easy example to start understanding natural language processing techniques and how they can be used for mapping.
The chapter takes a brief detour to consider different methods of creating transcripts from audio recordings. ...... PREVIEW ONLY ...
Next: 6. The Sentiment of Good News, Bad News and Darko News