exploring space and time

in literature, history & the humanities

This five-year project runs from 2012-16, funded by the European Research Council under a Starting Researcher Grant. The project aims to create a step-change in the way that place, space and geography are explored in the humanities. Building on Lancaster's technical expertise in Digital Humanities, Corpus Linguistics and Historical Geographical Information Systems (HGIS) and applied expertise in Lake District literature and social history, the project is developing and applying methodologies to allow unstructured texts - including books, newspapers and official reports - to be analysed in a in a manner that stresses space, place and mapping. More ...

our research

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: One of our main ambitions is to explore how quantitative research tools developed in the fields of Spatial Analysis and Computational Linguistics can be adapted to address qualitative research questions in the Humanities, and specifically in the disciplines of History and Literary Studies. For example, in our current research (see the Corpus of Lake District Writing), we are testing how GIS-based analysis can help us study different literary articulations of an actual, geographically located terrain: the English Lake District. 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 ...

 

Looking for learning resources?

In this section you can check out some of the lectures and presentations of the project. We are also working to offer soon other materials such as podcasts and GIS practicals.