SpaceWars: A Web Interface for Exploring the Spatio-temporal Dimensions of WWI Newspaper Reporting

International audienceIn this paper, we describe an interactive map that places automatically extracted location names on a map and allows historians to study spatial imaginaries across time and newspapers. Our contribution is twofold: first, we present a working instrument for historical studies that is freely available on the web; second, we describe a data analysis pipeline, which can also be applied to other data and material. Challenges we address in this paper range from handling textual noise introduced by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) applied to historical documents, georeferencing textual place mentions, and issues connected with web design and the ultimate user experience