Palimpsest/LitLong : Mining and Mapping Literary Edinburgh
- Submitting institution
-
University of Edinburgh
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 190725544
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Collection of creative and critical work
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- January
- Year
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This grouped output arose from a collaborative team project running 2013 to 2017. It includes four articles and two versions of an interactive website, jointly and separately co-authored by two members of the UOA. They demonstrate the depth of research involved in developing the project's underlying database, the literary and digital methodologies that were brought together address its data, and the tools and interface that were created for public dissemination. Should the double-weighting request be refused, the output as a whole should be attributed to Bea Alex (and the one article where she is not listed as author omitted).
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Palimpsest project was a multidisciplinary collaboration between literary, informatics,
and computer-visualisation specialists, which brought text-mining and digital-mapping
techniques to bear on Edinburgh's literary heritage. James Loxley was PI and Bea Alex
Research Fellow on the project, working with a team drawn from three Scottish universities.
This submission consists of four essays and two versions of a web application which
together present the scale and the underlying principles of the project. They demonstrate
the research involved in developing its database, the literary and digital methodologies that
were brought together, and the tools and interface that were created for public
dissemination.
Funded under an AHRC Big Data call, between 2013 and 2015, the Palimpsest team created
a database of literary texts set in Edinburgh, from an initial scan of hundreds of thousands of
digitised books. These texts were represented in the database by multiple extracts,
geolocated by place name using the Edinburgh Geoparser, which was developed by team
members. They were then visualised via a dynamic map interface for users to view. Under
the project title LitLong, an initial web interface and app was successfully launched in 2015.
In 2017, following engagement with users and potential stakeholders including the
Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust,
and with support from AHRC Follow-on Funding, a new map interface was researched and
built. For this, the dataset was expanded to include works collaboratively curated with
publishers such as Birlinn and Canongate, and engagement activities for schools and other
user communities were devised. The new interface was launched as a contribution to the
Book Festival’s outreach programme in summer 2017.
This output brings together research papers on the literary and digital aspects of the
project, and versions of the interactive map interfaces created for users
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
