Authorial London is a project that maps references to places in and around London that either have biographical or literary connections to authors. It is run by Stanford University and was originally led by Professor Martin Evans, but is currently maintained by members of the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research as well as others associated with the University.
The sources it uses to identify connections between authors and locations are works written by the author and biographical information written about them. All in all, the site examines 193 works by authors of the 14th to 20th centuries.
The project uses non-trivial references to places within the works it draws from to create data points. 40 texts were originally studied and information gathered from then was then used to do a digital search of 690 text files from Project Gutenberg by ‘Authorial London writers’ to gather more references to locations. Humans rechecked the passages identified to mitigate machine error. Different phrases representing the same place were manually pared down so there was a standardized name for each individual place. Google Maps an Nominatim were use to locate 2/3 of the locations and the rest were manually placed.
The data is presented using a map of London with a connection represented by a dot over the location. Maps from the late 19th C, late 18th C, and early 19th C are available, but only cover central London, whereas the modern map extends beyond. Various filters allow users to examine the data based on author, place, and work, with some smaller filters within these broader categories.
This project seems to combine literary and historical perspectives by examining not only works of fiction, but also biographical information. Because of this, the project allows the user to compare and contrast locations that an author wrote about with where they lived and areas that they frequented.
