A fascinating and very clearly written April 2015 article about automatically mining geolocation points out of plain text: “Mapping Words: Lessons Learned From a Decade of Exploring the Geography of Text”…

In Fall 2014 I collaborated with the US Army to create the first large-scale map of the geography of academic literature and the open web, geocoding more than 21 billion words of academic literature spanning the entire contents of JSTOR, DTIC, CORE, CiteSeerX, and the Internet Archive’s 1.6 billion PDFs relating to Africa and the Middle East, as well as a second project creating the first large-scale map of human rights reports. A key focus of this project was the ability to infuse geographic search into academic literature…”

We probably need a name for such activities, and also for mining eco/geo data out of old paintings and photographs of landscapes. Geo-mining is too 20th century and eco-unfriendly. Geo-gleaning and Geo-gleaner are terms that have a certain poetry about them, while also suggesting both the curatorial and the imprecise nature of the techniques.