Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities: Using Corpus Linguistics in a Literary GIS
Joanna Taylor
History, Lancaster University
This paper will outline research undertaken as part of the Leverhulme-funded project Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities: A Deep Map of the English Lake District (wp.lancs.ac.uk/lakesdeepmap). This project is interested in how a 'deep mapping' methodology that combines distant with close reading - including corpus linguistics with literary studies approaches - can advance new ways of reading historical texts. Its focus is on the Corpus of Lake District Writing, which corpus comprises 80 texts of various genres, including tourist guides, travel narratives, novels and poetry that date from 1622 to 1900. The paper will focus specifically on how digital methodologies taken from Historical GIS (a sub-field of historical geography and geographical information systems [GIS]) and corpus linguistics can be used productively alongside traditional literary analysis to further understandings of the written texts in our corpus.