Authorial London

Few things are so quickly dated and so obscure to outsiders in literature as references to place. A neighborhood nickname, a locally notorious alley, may be rich in meaning as Dickens writes them, but utterly baffle readers a mere generation later or a country distant.

Authorial London: About

The Authorial London project is a compilation of London places which have been referenced in literature, or which have featured in an author’s biography.

The project has different maps, reflecting London in different time periods. Explorers of the project can choose to focus on individual authors, specific genres/forms, certain areas of London, or a particular time. In any case, the project will display markers on the appropriate map alongside the relevant texts which reference them:

The Authorial London project draws from a corpus of “roughly 1,600 passages from 193 works written between the 14th and 20th centuries by 47 authors from 12 literary communities (periods)” at the time of writing. The research team collected these works from Project Gutenberg. A machine search was run on the corpus, which looked for matches to a list of London place names the researchers had previously compiled. The research team did not rely only on the machine search, but also on human reading: a human reader can identify “the silver thread” as a reference to the Thames, or recognize a pre-modern spelling (etc). Due to copyright issues, the research team is manually searching for references in modern works; as well as working more generally to expand the corpus. All ‘hits’ matching the research team’s criteria are geo-tagged in order for those references to be placed on the map.

The site uses a software platform called “Authorial {X}”, which, according to the “About” section of the prject, has “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.” There is good news for those who find that paragraph overwhelming: the researchers plan to release the Authorial {X} framework on GitHub for others to use.

In addition to that software platform, the researchers used ElasticSearch to index their corpus and an Apache Solr index of all passages for a free-text search function, the Google Maps and Nominatim geocoding services, and OpenStreetMap.

In terms of presentation, the references and markers are placed on maps from the Harvard College Library Digital Map Collection. In their “about” section, the researchers spoke briefly about the finer details of representing the markers considering the constraints of their map geography. (If the terms “centroid” or “Voronoi polygon” mean anything to you, you’re in for a treat.)

Authorial London provides us, in many cases for the first time, with a means to directly explore what places meant to writers as they lived and imagined them, to see how meaning changes over time and varies between writers, and to learn how places are reified as cultural concepts (Fleet Street, Scotland Yard) and transformed beyond recognition.

Authorial London: About

The Authorial London project is, by admission of its makers (and, in a sense, by nature) incomplete. Nevertheless, it occupies an interesting territory spanning across literature and literary criticism, history, geography, and sociology. Even without the promise of its software framework being released to the public, it makes a fine example of the way digital tools and modes of presentation can be used to examine the humanities from a new direction.

Now, with all of that being said: let’s hurry up and make an Authorial Scotland project, so that I can take my enjoyment of William McGonagall to the next level.

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

The Tay Bridge Disaster (1880)

Beautiful.