Building the dataset and identifying locations
The aim of the CLARIAH-VL Open Humanities Service Infrastructure is to advance digitally-enabled research in Humanities and the Arts by, among other things, providing data-level access to digitized and born-digital resources. In this blogpost series, we will communicate on research scenarios leading to and building upon the datasets made available through CLARIAH-VL. The previous blogpost introduced the research scenario “Mapping flood damages”. This one presents the methodology that was used, while the last one will display the results obtained.
Aim of the research scenario
Our societies are facing major meteorological disasters because climate changes greatly and because societies are no longer prepared to face them: many people live in risky areas when the risk itself is culturally no longer accepted. Recent research has shown that past societies used to be more resilient towards meteorological bad events (Soens 2018, De Keyzer et al. 2024), at least to the non-exceptional ones. Thinking about the daily resilience of societies to such events in the past means taking stock of past bad weather events: how frequent were they? What were the causes? Which places were the most impacted? This can be difficult because these events have whether not always left much trace in the documentation (because they were common), whether so much trace (because they were numerous) that they are difficult to manage. However, digital tools can help researchers in both cases. They can for instance greatly facilitate the visualization of specific natural disasters by automatizing the mapping of (forgotten) affected places. The aim of this research scenario is precisely to map semi-automatically the locations that have been mentioned in the Gazet van Antwerpen as having been under water because of a flood or a storm between 1911 and 1921, in order to try to answer the following question: where are the places that were impacted by storms and floods in provinces Antwerp and East-Flanders between 1911 and 1921? and To what extent were they affected ?
Steps taken
Step 1: Building a the dataset
We looked for every mention of the words “onder water” from 1911 to 1921 (“under water” in English. Ex: “this hamlet was under water because of the storm”) in the newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen accessed on BelgicaPress, the online newspaper database of the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR).

The words “onder water” appear on 317 pages between 1911 and 1921. Most of the time, this expression is used in the following contexts:
- consequently to a flood or a storm in Belgium
- consequently to a flood or a storm abroad
- when someone died from drowning
- when a fire broke out (most of the time on a ship but not always) and had to be extinguished using massive quantities of water
Once set aside the newspaper articles published to report one of the last three events, we can count 58 newspapers where the expression “onder water” is used at least one time to report the consequences of a flood or a storm that occurred somewhere in Belgium.
Unfortunately, BelgicaPress does not yet give access to the OCR version of the newspapers which means that, to be extracted, the results of a research has to be manually copied. We therefore copied manually the content of all the relevant newspapers articles containing the expression “onder water” in an Excel sheet.
Step 2: Matching the articles with the Belgian Historical Gazetteer
All these articles contain at least one place name. However localizing those places can prove difficult since names of town, villages or hamlets changed greatly in Belgium in the last two centuries, because of incorrect transfers or translations and the variability introduced by local dialects (Von Busekist 1998, Taeldeman 2001, Witte 2011). We therefore cannot use a contemporary gazetteer to locate places mentioned in those articles, and have to use an historical one, namely the Belgian Historical Gazetteer. This gazetteer – still under construction (CLARIAH-VL, SIC 4) – aims at providing researchers with a collection of data that 1) does not stop at Belgian provincial borders, which 2) goes beyond the level of municipalities and 3) that does not stop to the 19th century but go deeper in the past.

For the needs of this research scenario, we made a first matching test between the content of the articles and the Belgian Historical gazetteer (BHG). We did this using a formula that asks Excel to look for specific character strings (place names registered in the gazetteer) within a text (the newspaper articles).
The BHG currently covers only provinces Antwerp and East-Flanders. A lot of the place names mentioned in the articles could therefore not be found in de gazetteer (36% of the total). For 42% of the remaining data, the matching worked perfectly giving the good result immediately. In 15% of the cases, we had to manually do a small intervention to get the good result (for instance a small correction in the spelling of the place name that had been incompletely or badly transcribed). In 38% of the cases, the formula did not succeed in finding the correct place name in the gazetteer, for various reasons:
- the formula found the good toponym but not in the right province (disambiguation problem)
- the formula could only find one toponym among the several that were mentioned in the article (the formula is not made to repeat the search once one toponym has been found)
- the formula stopped the search once it has found a corresponding toponym in the gazetteer that was only part of the one mentioned in the article (example: “Gentbrugge” was matched with “Gent”)
In the previous cases we had to manually correct of supply the toponym found by the formula. Those problem will be solve in the future, in the framework of CLARIAH +, when a collaboration with experts in text extraction will help us to get a better matching query.
In the next blogpost we will explain we get a visualization of the results of this matching test and how it offers research perspective.
Next step (and next blogpost)
Visualizing floods damages (blogpost 3/3)
References
Von Busekist, Astrid. La Belgique. Politique des langues et construction de l’État, de 1780 à nos jours, Paris-Bruxelles, Éditions Duculot, 1998.
Maïka De Keyzer, Tim Soens and Christophe Verbruggen, 2024. Mens en natuur : een geschiedenis, (Gent: Academia Press), 2014, 313p.
Taeldeman, Johan. “De Regenboog van de Vlaamse Dialecten.” Het Taallandschap in Vlaanderen, Johan Taeldeman et al. (eds.), Academia Press, 2001, 49–58.
Witte, Els. “La question linguistique en Belgique dans une perspective historique », Pouvoirs 136(1), 37-50.
Tim Soens, 2018. “Resilient Societies, Vulnerable People: Coping with North Sea Floods Before 1800”, Past & Present, 241 (1), 2018 : 143–177, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gty018






