Searching maps by words: how machine learning changes the way we explore map collections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Large numbers of maps have always been difficult to examine in detail, even now that they are being digitized around the world. But imagine searching digitised map collections by their text content: moving beyond titles or other catalogue fields, you could search every single word that appears on map sheets, as if they were book pages in any of the well-known, full-text-search enabled collections. This experience is now a reality. This piece is a data-driven journey across such experimental “text on maps” searching in the online interface for one of the largest and best-known digital libraries of maps, the David Rumsey Map Collection. Starting from the search for a single placename, the author discusses potential, as well as the limitations, of this approach, and suggests ways in which this new interface, which brings together the power of machine learning, the beauty of data visualisation, and the interactivity of annotation, can fuel scientific curiosity as well as playful exploration
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.054 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.040 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".