Jerusalem: locating the colonies and neighborhoods

Introduction

The goal of this project is to study the construction of neighborhoods in Jerusalem over time. We collect information about Jerusalem neighborhoods from four different sources, including the book Jerusalem and its Environs, the Wikipedia category Neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, the Wikipedia list Places of Jerusalem - Neighborhoods and Wikidata entity neighborhood of Jerusalem. These sources provide us with different information with different focuses. We merge this content through matching methods and present it on a web page. The page organizes and visualizes all the information. With the timeline, search, and view details features, users can get a clear picture of the Jerusalem community in our map interface. At the same time, the matching approach we use can be easily applied to other cities with multiple sources of information (similar, different, or even contradictory), with the potential for reuse in the future.

Motivation

The study of the geography and chronology of neighborhoods in Jerusalem can provide valuable insights into the city's past and present. The location of a neighborhood can often reflect the social, economic, and political forces that shaped it, as well as the cultural traditions and values of its residents.

Examining the founding year of a neighborhood can also provide insight into the city's history and development. Visualizing the location and founded year of neighborhoods in Jerusalem can be a powerful tool for understanding the city's past and present. By mapping and analyzing these data, it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of the cultural, social, and economic dynamics of different neighborhoods and the forces that have shaped them.

A city with such a rich and varied history as Jerusalem has many different accounts of it. These accounts from various sources are an important basis when studying it. How to integrate the information from these sources is also one of the focuses of our research.

Deliverables

• OCR results of Development of Jerusalem neighborhoods information from Jerusalem and its Environs.
• Crawler results from Wikipedia category Neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, Wikipedia list Places of Jerusalem - Neighborhoods, and Wikidata entity neighborhood of Jerusalem.
• Integrated database with multiple information sources after perfect matching and fuzzy matching.
• An interactive and user-friendly webpage showing the changes in neighborhoods of Jerusalem with time, with:
  • A timeline feature that illustrates the evolution of the construction of neighborhoods in Jerusalem over time.
  • A search function that enables users to search for neighborhoods by name.
  • A dedicated sub-page that contains relevant information for each neighborhood.

Methodology

Data collection

OCR method for paper book

Jerusalem and its Environs is a book written by TODO in TODO. This book provides detailed information about development of the Jerusalem neighborhoods during different time periods. We used OCR technology to scan relevant information from the book. In addition, because many of the community names contain punctuations and annotations, we also performed manual proofreading to ensure the accuracy of the data. Here is an example of data from the book. Information about the name, founded year, inhabitants, initiative is provided. Remarks are also included in some cases.

This source gives us the founded year of neighborhoods in Jerusalem, an important feature in our study. However, not every neighborhood has an exact year of construction. For neighborhoods where the founded year is an interval and where the year of construction is an ambiguous period (e.g., 1900s or end of Mandate), we choose the first year of the period for further processing.

Here is an example of the comparison of raw data, OCR result and manually checked result:

TODO

Project Plan and Milestones

Date	Task	Completion
By Week 3	Brainstorm project ideas. Prepare slides for initial project idea presentation.	✓
By Week 4	Organize the Jerusalem neighborhood information from the book into csv files by OCR. Conduct manual review and adjust formats.	✓
By Week 5	Get neighborhood information on Wikipedia through crawlers, including names, links, and coordinates.	✓
By Week 6	Merge the data get from wikipedia different website. Extract the same neighborhoods in both book and wikipedia.	✓
By Week 7	Start working on webpages. Decide to use GitHub pages and bootstrap as our output methods and learn the basic concepts.	✓
By Week 8	Use fuzzy matching method to link information from the book and Wikipedia. Work on webpage: use leaflet to present maps.	✓
By Week 9	Transfer data into usable format for HTML. Combine the front-end webpage and back-end data. Create our first demo webpage.	✓
By Week 10	Fill in information on wiki. Get prepared for the midterm presentation.	✓
By Week 11	Get neighborhood information on Wikidata through crawlers, including names, links, and establish time. Merge the information from Wikidata to existing data. Find out a way to deal with duplicated data and extract results from fuzzy matching.
By Week 12	Find neighborhoods with area shapes and find out a way to visualize. Create searching function on the website. Adding information and adjust the website.
By Week 13	Create another page to list the information on the website. Create Github Pages for our webpage.
By Week 14	Complete the wiki on motivation, methods, results... Refine the visualization of our webpage
By Week 15	Final presentation

Github Repository

https://github.com/WayerLiu/fdh_jerusalem.github.io