Authorial London: A Digital Humanities Exploration

What is this Project About?

Authorial London is a compilation of locations mentioned by authors in their works or biographies made originally by Martin Evans, and developed Kenneth Ligda, PhD, Karl Grossner, PhD, and David McClure at Stanford University. There are as map layers that can be applied to show what London would have looked like in the late 19 century, in the late 18th century, and in the early 18th century in order to see the London the authors would be familiar with. This site would be most helpful for the fields of English and history.

Sources

The project is made from 1,600 passages of 193 works by 47 different authors, from 12 different periods of literature found on Project Gutenberg and three historical maps from Harvard College Library Digital Map Collection.

The map points connect to the passages that mention the location.

Processes

The page so nicely walks the viewer through how the site was designed and programed in the about tag in the upper right hand corner. The researchers used ElasticSearch to index the texts and an Apache Solr index of them to search the text for key terms, as some places are referred to by multiple names. The locations were then geotagged to Google Maps using OpenStreetMap labels and Google Maps and Nominatim geocoding services. In the about tag the programers say “The Authorial London web application has been built with a Ruby-on-Rails and PostgreSQL database backend, and a hybrid set of JavaScript front-end technologies, including the Backbone/Marionette framework, Leaflet/MapBox for mapping, JQuery, and D3.js.”

The About Tag

Presentation

The data is shown as geotagged points on various maps of the town from four points of history. There is an interactive sidebar that allows the viewer to select authors, neighborhoods of London, and locations of specific works on top of the options of genre, form of writing, period, and social standing of the author. There are different color dots showing what locations are tagged from works, biographies, or both. The website also provides the option of comparing the locations mentioned by different authors.

Overall

The Authorial London Website is a cool way of analyzing the locations that authors are writing about. However, I have to give caution, because when the website is opened it displays a warning saying that the website is very insecure and that the connection is easily hacked. If that is a concern for anyone, do not visit the site.

Author: Emily W

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