8 Publication place
Publication place information is primarily derived from MARC21 fields 260a and 264a, which record the location of publication. These fields exhibit substantial variation in spelling, language, and formatting, requiring systematic harmonization to enable consistent geographic analysis. The processing pipeline integrates normalization, synonym resolution, and external mappings to standardize place names and link them to countries and geocoordinates, while preserving traceability of ambiguous and discarded cases.
The publication place field is enriched by using 264a when 260a is missing, after which the raw place strings are harmonized with polish_place(). The harmonized place names are then linked to countries with get_country() and joined with existing geocoding data to add longitude, latitude, and mapping identifiers. The workflow saves the processed table, creates accepted and discarded summaries, records discarded non-empty original values with IDs, and produces separate accepted summaries for the 1809–1917 subset. There are 1207088 records with missing author name information in the original raw data.
8.1 Complete Dataset Overview
114200 unique publication places; available for 851136 documents (65%).
Terms that are clearly not place names can be added to stopwords;
The synonyme list contains candidate place names that were identified during processing but ultimately rejected, rather than valid variants of accepted names. These entries typically reflect ambiguous, malformed, or non-standardized strings that could not be reliably matched to a canonical location. Some may be recoverable with additional context or external authority matching, but are conservatively excluded in the current workflow.
8.2 Publication countries
- 37 unique publication countries; available for 100771 documents (8%).
- 113802 places with unknown publication country (99.7% of the unique places; can be added to country mappings)
- potentially ambiguous region-country mappings (these may occur in the data in various synonymes and the country is not always clear when multiple countries have a similar place name; the default country is listed first). NOTE: possible improvements should not be done in this output summary but instead in the country mapping file.
8.3 Geocoordinates
- 7.6% of the documents were matched to geographic coordinates (based on COMHIS geomapping process).
- 113836 unique places (99.7% of all unique places and 92.4% of all documents) are missing geocoordinates. See list of places missing geocoordinate information.
8.4 Subset Analysis: 1809-1917
7564 unique publication places; available for 45392 documents (63%).
Unique publication country for a period 1809-1917: 13; available for 3102 documents (4%).
Top-20 publication places are shown together with the number of documents.
| Country | Documents (n) | Fraction (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Finland | 2917 | 4.0 |
| USA | 89 | 0.1 |
| Sweden | 24 | 0.0 |
| Germany | 18 | 0.0 |
| Russia | 15 | 0.0 |
| Canada | 14 | 0.0 |
