This paper describes work in progress on devising automatic and parallel methods for geoparsing large digital historical textual data by combining the strengths of three natural language processing (NLP) tools, the Edinburgh Geoparser, spaCy and defoe, and employing different tokenisation and named entity recognition (NER) techniques. We apply these tools to a large collection of nineteenth century Scottish geographical dictionaries, and describe preliminary results obtained when processing this data.

We propose a bias-aware methodology to engage with power relations in natural language processing (NLP) research. NLP research rarely engages with bias in social contexts, limiting its ability to mitigate bias. While researchers have recommended actions, technical methods, and documentation practices, no methodology exists to integrate critical reflections on bias with technical NLP methods. In this paper, after an extensive and interdisciplinary literature review, we contribute a bias-aware methodology for NLP research. We also contribute a definition of biased text, a discussion of the implications of biased NLP systems, and a case study demonstrating how we are executing the bias-aware methodology in research on archival metadata descriptions.