Cognitive Geographies of Catastrophe Narratives: Georeferenced Interview Transcriptions as Language Resource for Models of Forced Displacement (2025)

Abstract: We present a machine-understandable geotagged dataset of translated interviews from the Nakba Archive alongside a complete georeferenced dataset of named locations mentioned in the interviews. In a preliminary analysis of this dataset, we find that the cognitive relationship of interviewees to place and spatiality is significantly correlated with gender. Our data also shows that interviewees with birthplaces depopulated in the 1948 Nakba incorporate references to named places in their interviews in substantially different ways than other interviewees. This suggests that the status of the interviewee’s birthplace may impact the way they narrate their experiences. Our work serves as a foundation for continued and expanded statistical and cognitive models of Palestinian forced displacement.

## introduction the nakba archive @xcite , a grassroots oral history collective, conducts and archives interviews with palestinians forcibly displaced during the 1948 palestinian nakba. only thirty of the over five hundred interviews in the archive have been transcribed and translated into english. in this paper, we present a new language resource to enable semantic and cognitive geospatial analysis of the translated portion of the nakba archive. we provide a georeferenced, machineunderstandable dataset of the translated interviews from the nakba archive. due to the limits of current named entity recognition (ner) models for multilingual datasets, we performed the georeferencing manually. we also offer a preliminary analysis of the interviews through the lens of cognitive geography and computational corpus linguistics. we observe two significant outcomes in our preliminary analysis. first, we find that intervie-wees' linguistic usage of named places and types of places is significantly correlated to gender (see 4.1). second, we find that interviews with people whose birthplaces were depopulated in the 1948 nakba contain references to fewer named places, places in a smaller geographic range, and places, on average, farther from the interviewee's birthplace than other interviews. this suggests that the status of the interviewee's hometown may impact the way they narrate their experiences (see 4.3-4). ## data and language resource creation the nakba archive (the nakba archive, 2002) is a digital collection of interviews with palestinians forcibly displaced during the 1948 palestinian nakba. of the over five-hundred oral histories currently preserved in the nakba archive, only thirty have been transcribed and translated from arabic to english. our structured, geotagged, and georeferenced dataset created from the interviews presented by the nakba archive is a significant new language resource for computational historians, linguists, and activists. the dataset has been published in the harvard dataverse @xcite . ## results and analysis of all the locations mentioned in these interviews, palestine is by far the most frequent. over 7% of geographic references are to palestine. the next most common reference is to the large city of 'akka (acre), which represents 4.97% of references. ## conclusion we present a geotagged machine-understandable dataset of the translated interviews from the nakba archive alongside a complete georeferenced dataset of named locations mentioned in the interviews. our structured, geotagged, and georeferenced dataset created from the interviews presented by the nakba archive is a significant new language resource for computational historians, linguists, and activists. we also offer a preliminary analysis as an exemplum of how this data can be used in the future. we find 1,168 references to 331 unique named geographic locations in the thirty translated interviews available in the nakba archive. we find a significant correlation between the gender of the interviewee and the frequency of references to geographic locations. by considering spatial distance, we find that interviewees mention places slightly farther from their birthplace the farther they are into the interview and that smaller, more specific locations have a greater impact on summative distance near the end of the interviews. finally, we also observe a much slower rate of increase of summative distance for interviewees with birthplaces depopulated in 1948. investigation into the underlying data reveals that such interviewees mention fewer named places overall and present narratives with smaller geographic ranges. we intend for these results to serve as a model for continued work and to allow for work towards a cognitive model of geospatial displacement. information about how displaced peoples understand place and their role in it is invaluable for those working to promote peace and create opportunities for healing connections between homelands and forcibly displaced peoples.