Annotation of Toponyms in TEI Digital Literary Editions and Linking to the Web of Data

This paper aims to discuss the challenges and benefits of the annotation of place names in literary texts and literary criticism. We shall first highlight the problems of encoding spatial information in digital editions using the TEI format by means of two manual annotation experiments and the discussion of various cases. This will lead to the question of how to use existing semantic web resources to complement and en-rich toponym mark-up, in particular to provide mentions with precise geo-referencing. Finally the automatic annotation of a large corpus will show the potential of visualizing places from texts, by illustrating an analysis of the evolution of literary life from the spatial and geographical point of view.