Analysis and GIS to Examine Historical Accounts of the English Lake District

This paper reports on interdisciplinary research into the automated geographical analysis of historical text corpora. It provides an introduction to this research, which is being completed by two interrelated projects: the European Research Council-funded Spatial Humanities project and the Leverhulme Trust-funded Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities project. In addition to contextualising the work of these projects, the paper introduces a case study that applies collocation analysis, automated geo-parsing, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The focus of this study is a 1.5 million-word corpus of writing about the English Lake District. This corpus comprises 80 works written between the years 1622 and 1900. In investigating this corpus, we demonstrate how a hybrid geographical and corpus-based methodology can be used to study the application of specific aesthetic terminology in historical writing about the Lakeland region. Acknowledgements: The research leading to these findings has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust, as part of the Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities research project, and from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013): ERC grant Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places [agreement number 283850].