Mapping Ocean Stories Using Text Analysis

Oregon Convention Center 

Maine and its coastal and fishing communities are facing unprecedented challenges due to climate change. Oral histories provide a powerful set of insights into how ecosystems and communities have responded to changing conditions and fish abundance over time. The goal of our project, Mapping Ocean Stories, is to study the changes in species distributions and commercial fisheries using data science techniques to offer a bird's eye view of coastal Maine over several generations. By amplifying the voices of Maine's coastal communities, our goal is to bridge the gap between policies crafted by agencies without specific insights into the inshore and offshore local knowledge, and support better adaptive decisions that contribute to the resilience of Maine marine fisheries and aquaculture industries.

In this talk I will present the text analysis and geocoding approaches we are using to identify spatial activities from oral history interviews. I will also discuss the challenges associated with locating activities in the ocean from text descriptions and the ways in which we are capturing uncertainty in the data.

Text Analysis

Geographical Information Systems

Spatial data

Local Knowledge

Oral Histories 

Section on Text Analysis