Integrating techniques from Computational Linguistics, Cultural Geography and Spatial Analysis, our interdisciplinary team is developing tools and methods for historians and literary scholars who are interested in exploring textual information within a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) environment.

We conducted two major applied studies to demonstrate how these methods can generate new avenues of interpretation and inquiry.

The first of these studies brought together a corpus (comprising over 1,500,000 words) of letters, journals, and guidebooks in order to chart the cultural evolution of the English Lake District from the early 17c to the early 20c. The second study drew on the Registrar General’s Reports for England and Wales, from 1801 to 1937, in order to assess patterns of disease and mortality during the nineteenth century. In both cases our preliminary findings affirm how Literary and Historical GIS projects not only facilitate the discovery of new trends and constellations of relationship, but also promote the experimental articulation of new ideas.

In addition to these studies, we also worked  to enhance the skills-base in the spatial humanities by running free summer schools and seminars on the application of GIS within humanities research. Please check our Skills Development page for more details.

© Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS & Places