Christopher Elliott Donaldson

Mapping ‘Wordsworthshire’ : a GIS study of literary tourism in Victorian Lakeland

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Victorian Culture on 14/08/2015, available online: doi: 10.1080/13555502.2015.1058089

Alts, Abbreviations, and AKAs:historical onomastic variation and automated named entity recognition

Accurate automated identification of named places is a major concern for scholars in the digital humanities, and especially for those engaged in research that depends upon the gazetteer-led recognition of specific aspects. The field of onomastics examines the linguistic roots and historical development of names, which have for the most part only standardized into single officially recognized forms since the late nineteenth century. Even slight spelling variations can introduce errors in geotagging techniques, and these differences in place-name spellings are thus vital considerations when seeking high rates of correct geospatial identification in historical texts. This article offers an overview of typical name-based variation that can cause issues in the accurate geotagging of any historical resource. The article argues that careful study and documentation of these variations can assist in the development of more complete onymic records, which in turn may inform geo-taggers through a cycle of variational recognition. It demonstrates how patterns in regional naming variation and development, across both specific and generic name elements, can be identified through the historical records of each known location. The article uses examples taken from a digitized corpus of writing about the English Lake District, a collection of 80 texts that date from between 1622 and 1900. Four of the more complex spelling-based problems encountered during the creation of a manual gazetteer for this corpus are examined. Specifically, the article demonstrates how and why such variation must be expected, particularly in the years preceding the standardization of place-name spellings. It suggests how procedural developments may be undertaken to account for such geo-referential issues in the Named Entity Recognition (NER) strategies employed by future projects. Similarly, the benefits of such multigenre corpora to assist in completing onomastic records is also shown via examples of new name forms discovered for prominent sites in the Lake District. This focus is accompanied by a discussion of the influence of literary works on place-name standardization—an aspect not typically accounted for in traditional onomastic study—to illustrate the extent to which authorial interests in regional toponymic histories can influence linguistic development.

Exploring Deep Mapping Concepts: Crosthwaite’s Map and West’s Picturesque Stations

What are the requirements for building a historic deep map using literary data? This is the question we sought to address as part of an exploratory prototype in Lancaster University Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities: A Deep Map of the English Lake District project. We created a prototype deep map based on Thomas Wests A guide to the Lakes, and a historic map of Derwent Water Lake created by Peter Crosthwaite. Our prototype maps the locations of Wests picturesque viewing stations and creates connections between the literary work and visual representations of the places described. This article describes our approach to building this prototype and discusses what we learned and the issues we revealed about creating a historic deep map.

A deeply annotated testbed for geographical text analysis: The Corpus of Lake District Writing

This paper describes the development of an annotated corpus which forms a challenging testbed for geographical text analysis methods. This dataset, the Corpus of Lake District Writing (CLDW), consists of 80 manually digitised and annotated texts (comprising over 1.5 million word tokens). These texts were originally composed between 1622 and 1900, and they represent a range of different genres and authors. Collectively, the texts in the CLDW constitute an indicative sample of writing about the English Lake District during the early seventeenth century and the early twentieth century. The corpus is annotated more deeply than is currently possible with vanilla Named Entity Recognition, Disambiguation and geoparsing. This is especially true of the geographical information the corpus contains, since we have undertaken not only to link different historical and spelling variants of place-names, but also to identify and to differentiate geographical features such as waterfalls, woodlands, farms or inns. In addition, we illustrate the potential of the corpus as a gold standard by evaluating the results of three different NLP libraries and geoparsers on its contents. In the evaluation, the standard NER processing of the text by the different NLP libraries produces many false positive and false negative results, showing the strength of the gold standard.

Digital humanities and tourism history

ABSTRACT This symposium considers how the digital humanities (DH), which relies on computer technology to interpret data and present conclusions, can enhance our understanding of tourism history. It begins with an introduction that defines DH, considers how DH can assist the way in which we think about tourism, and discusses the strengths and limitations of applications like text mining and digital mapping. This is followed by a review of the scholarship on digital mapping and the humanities which also highlights some of the important themes and projects that have sprung from this dynamic interdisciplinary dialogue. The latter half of the symposium is dedicated to two project reports. The first describes how the Grand Tour Project at Stanford University is utilizing a database of digital entries which combine digitised text and structured data to illuminate connections between eighteenth-century travellers. The second discusses how the Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities project at Lancaster University is using geo-spatial technologies to examine the relationship between historically evolving ideas about tourist destinations in the Lake District and the contemporary management of such sites. The symposium concludes with some contemplation of the future developments in the realm of digital humanities and tourism history.

Digital pedagogy in and beyond the classroom

ISSN: 1355-5502 (Print) 1750-0133 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjvc20 Digital Pedagogy in and beyond the Classroom Zoe Alker & Christopher Donaldson To cite this article: Zoe Alker & Christopher Donaldson (2016) Digital Pedagogy in and beyond the Classroom, Journal of Victorian Culture, 21:4, 548-549, DOI: 10.1080/13555502.2016.1233906 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2016.1233906

Down the Duddon: Wordsworth and His Literary Pilgrims

Wordsworth’s later poetry, though traditionally despised, has recently aroused significant scholarly interest. From biographies to critical appreciations, several studies have highlighted the historical importance of the verse Wordsworth produced after the period of his “golden prime” (c. 1798-1808). The present article contributes to this larger project of revaluation by engaging with Wordsworth’s precedent-setting 1820 collection The River Duddon. Combining close readings of this collection with detailed assessments of its publication and reception history, the article explores both how The River Duddon secured Wordsworth’s reputation as “the great poet of the Lakes” and how this reputation was perpetuated by those readers who sought to experience the world behind his words. In doing so, the article contends that more than The Excursion, or even The Prelude, The River Duddon constitutes the defining work of Wordsworth’s later career.