Perceiving Arctic Landscapes Through the Sentiment Analysis of Inuit Place Names

• Main Author: Hughes, Colleen
• Other Authors: Dawson, Peter, Oetelaar, Gerald, Levy, Richard
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Arts 2018
• Subjects: Landscape Archaeology; Sentiment Analysis; Phenomenology; Place Names; Caribou Inuit; Anthropology; Archaeology; Anthropology > Cultural; Arctic; Nunavut; inuit; Kivalliq
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1880/106250; https://doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/5248

Landscape archaeologists have debated for decades over the use of phenomenology as an archaeological method. The analysis of place names has formed an important part of landscape approaches. Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing computer software that evaluates digital texts for negative, neutral, and positive opinions and emotions. This software was chosen to inform a determination of how and if a phenomenological method could be achieved within landscape archaeology through the sentiment analysis of place names. Sentiment analysis was used to analyse over 600 Inuit place name descriptions from the Kivalliq Region in Nunavut. I explore how analyzing place names using sentiment analysis can be used as a way to understand the phenomenology of surrounding landscapes. The results of the analysis indicate that some place names reflect areas on the landscape which illicit strong positive and negative opinions and feelings. The polarity of these opinions is often associated with events that can be associated with hardship and tragedy, as well as success, wellness, and happiness. While archaeologists have used place names to place archaeological sites into a context and as a site prediction method, sentiment analysis shows little or no correlation between positive or negative opinions about the occupation of archaeological sites. This has significant implications for the use of toponymic archaeological interpretation.