Spatial Humanities

GIS & spatial analysis of texts. We are developing GIS & spatial methodologies for the analysis of texts in literature, history and the humanities. These methods are being piloted with a range of sources including literature, guide books, newspapers and government reports. The techniques developed will be applicable to modern sources including 'born-digital' material and e-resources. More ...

Corpus Linguistics & Collocation Analysis. Corpus Linguistics uses computerised techniques to summarise and analyse large bodies of text known as corpora. One such technique, the study of collocations - co-occurrence patterns among words or categories of words - is central to our approach to spatial analysis of texts. More ...

The English Lake District: Using the techniques developed with GIS we are looking to analyse qualitative sources. We will use these to explore the different ways in which different writers have represented the Lake District and how this has changed though the 18th and 19th centuries. This will provide us with an applied test of our techniques and, more importantly, allow us to illustrate to a wide literary audience how spatial humanities approaches can make a major applied contribution to knowledge in their disciplines. More ...

Health and society in nineteenth and twentieth century England & Wales: We are looking to bridge the quantitative and qualitative divide. We are conducting a study of how English and Welsh society changed through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by using GIS to integrate a wide range of sources. In this way we will both give an exemplar of using GIS to integrate data silos and also develop new understandings of the way that socio-economic changes affected mortality patterns. More ...