TextGrounder has moved to Bitbucket! Please see the TextGrounder Bitbucket repository for up-to-date code and documentation.

Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the
ground and sea...
-- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1891-1892 Edition)

TextGrounder is a system that processes texts to identify the places and times that are mentioned in them and disambiguates them to points on Earth or on the timeline. The system uses a number of natural language processing components, plus unsupervised machine learning methods for disambiguation. The output of the system can be used to create various geotemporal visualizations of texts and text corpora, for example, on Google Earth. You can see some snapshots of preliminary visualizations.

TextGrounder is part of the TeXIT project and is supported by generous grants from the New York Community Trust and the University of Texas at Austin's Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services.