Mapping the Past: Geographically Linking an Early 20th Century Swedish Encyclopedia with Wikidata

In this paper, we describe the extraction of all the location entries from a prominent Swedish encyclopedia from the early 20th century, the textitNordisk Familjebok `Nordic Family Book.' We focused on the second edition called textitUggleupplagan, which comprises 38 volumes and over 182,000 articles. This makes it one of the most extensive Swedish encyclopedias. Using a classifier, we first determined the category of the entries. We found that approximately 22 percent of them were locations. We applied a named entity recognition to these entries and we linked them to Wikidata. Wikidata enabled us to extract their precise geographic locations resulting in almost 18,000 valid coordinates. We then analyzed the distribution of these locations and the entry selection process. It showed a higher density within Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The paper sheds light on the selection and representation of geographic information in the textitNordisk Familjebok, providing insights into historical and societal perspectives. It also paves the way for future investigations into entry selection in different time periods and comparative analyses among various encyclopedias.