James Loxley

Palimpsest: Improving assisted curation of loco-specific literature

Text mining and information visualization techniques applied to large-scale historical and literary document collections have enabled new types of humanities research. The assumption behind such efforts is often that trends will emerge from the analysis despite errors for individual data points and that noise will be dominated by the signal in the data. However, for some text analysis tasks, the technology is unable to perform as well as domain experts, perhaps because it does not have sufficient world knowledge or metadata available. Yet, the advantage of language processing technology is that it can process at scale, even if not perfectly accurately. Geo-locating literary works is one example where human expert knowledge is invaluable when it comes to distinguishing between candidate works. This was the underlying assumption in Palimpsest, an interdisciplinary digital humanities research project on mining literary Edinburgh. From the outset, the project adopted an assisted curation process whereby the automatic processing of large data collections was combined with manual checking to identify literary works set in Edinburgh. In this article, we introduce the assisted curation process and evaluate how the feedback from literary scholars helped to improve the technology, thereby highlighting the importance of placing humanities research at the core of digital humanities projects.

The Routledge Companion to Spatial History

In this chapter we describe how GIS has been used in recent years to understand why, locally, nationally in Britain and worldwide, the bulk of the population seems destined to live in ‘under-performing’ regions; as they do so, more are poor, and the rich are becoming ever more separate from the rest. This chapter traces changes over time: decades, centuries and in one case millennia; all involve inequality, poverty and wealth.

Poetry, portraiture and praise: Suckling and Van Dyck, Lovelace and Lely

ABSTRACT The interrelationship between poetry and painting, a perennial focus for critical enquiry, takes on a particular cast in the cavalier poetry of the early to middle seventeenth century. Influenced both by the dominance of Van Dyck’s style of portraiture and by the public prominence of epideictic rhetoric, the moment of ekphrasis becomes an opportunity to practice and to explore the viability of praise. This essay examines the reflexivity of an epideictic poetry that makes the praising art its focus, through an examination of works in which claims for the qualities of the artistry in question are permitted to reflect back on the accomplishment of the works themselves. In poems by John Suckling and Richard Lovelace we see how the resort to ekphrasis permits a moment of aesthetic and poetic self-criticism that demonstrates the extent to which cavalier poetry could involve a searching examination of its own enabling conditions.

Significant Others: On the Comparison of Shakespeare and Jonson

ABSTRACT This introduction situates the essays that follow both in relation to prior work comparing Shakespeare and Jonson and in the light of recent developments in the study of both playwrights that have questioned the terms of such comparisons. Work on Jonson has increasingly focused on his theatrical innovations, his masque writing, his biography, and on archival discoveries; work on Shakespeare has cast him both as literary dramatist and as collaborative author; and more generally, studies of early modern drama have decentred the figure of the ‘great dramatist’, exploring other ways of organising dramatic production.

‘Public feasts’: Ben Jonson as literary celebrity

ABSTRACT Ben Jonson has long been acknowledged as a writer concerned with the effects of fame, but has most often been construed as a figure in conflict with the cultural processes of commercial print and performance through which he made his reputation. However, the recent discovery of an eyewitness account of his 1618 walk from London to Edinburgh shows us an author more at ease with the public gaze. This article draws on contemporary thinking about celebrity to argue for a revision of the customary view of a Ben Jonson fighting with ill fame, and to see him as a more active participant in the processes through which his persona was produced and circulated. This has implications for how we understand the genealogy of literary celebrity, and allows us to situate the early modern interest in, and concern with, the media or cultural production, in a longer history.