Palimpsest: Improving assisted curation of loco-specific literature

1. Introduction This paper reports on interdisciplinary work carried out for the Palimpsest project, focusing on mining literary works set in Edinburgh, a UNESCO City of Literature. 2 The project's aim is to use text mining to scour accessible literary works and find those mentioning Edinburgh or places within it. We ground " loco-specific " passages of text by identifying their latitudes and longitudes, so that both scholars and the public can geographically explore their fictional city. Palimpsest is a collaboration between literary scholars studying the use of place in literature and computer scientists working on text mining and information visualisation. Through a range of maps and accessible visualisations, users are able to explore the spatial relations of the literary city at particular times in its history, in the works of specific authors, or across eras and writers.