Professor Ian Gregory

Additional Information

I co-founded and co-direct Lancaster's Digital Humanities Centre.

Research Overview

I work in Digital Humanities and am particularly interested in using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) with texts as well as the more traditional quantitative sources. I have used these approaches to study a range of topics from historical demography to Lake District literature. This research has been the subject of a number of major projects including the European Research Council funded Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places, the Leverhulme Trust funded Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities and, most recently, the ESRC/NSF Funded Space Time Narratives project. For much more on my research see my personal website.

PhD Supervision Interests

I would be interested in supervising any PhD student who wants to do a PhD that uses Digital Humanities, Historical GIS or Spatial Humanities in any way. One area of particular interest is that at Lancaster we are very lucky to have access to the underlying data that make up some very large digital collections. This means that PhD students will be able to conduct research that uses these sources in, for example, corpus linguistics, GIS or statistical software, without the limitations imposed by public web interfaces. These include large textual corpora such as: Early English Books Online (http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/tcp-eebo); the Histpop collection of population reports for Britain and Ireland, 1801-1937 (http://www.histpop.org); the British Library's Nineteenth Century Newspapers Collection (http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/730); and a major corpus of Lake District writing (http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/spatialhum.wordpress/?page_id=43). If required, we can geo-reference these such that they can be analysed using geographical information systems (GIS). We also have access to several major quantitative databases including: the Integrated Census Micro-data (ICeM) data of individual-level census data from 1851-1911 (http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/research/icem); aggregate data from the Great Britain Historical GIS covering much of the 19th and 20th centuries (http://www.gbhgis.org); and similar resources for Ireland. Again, this material can be incorporated into GIS. Additional permissions may be required to use some sources, however we would be very interested in hearing from anyone who is developing a PhD that uses any of these, with or without GIS. Training in software and methods including corpus linguistics, GIS and databases can be provided. What we are really interested in project ideas that either conduct applied research or develop methodologies that exploit the vast amounts of historical information in these sources. Do feel free to contact me informally if you would like to discuss anything.