Textual Geographies

FAIN: HK-250673-16

Wayne State University (Detroit, MI 48201-1347)
Matthew Wilkens (Project Director: February 2016 to present)

The further refinement of the dataset and the development of the user interface for the Textual Geographies project, which allows scholars and students to extract and study spatial references found in collections housed in the HathiTrust Digital Library.

The Textual Geographies project collects, organizes, and makes widely available high-quality geographic data from millions of books in multiple languages to enable new scholarship in the humanities. The project responds to demonstrated need in fields including literary studies, history, foreign languages, area studies, geography, and allied disciplines for large-scale information about the uses of geographic space in textual sources. Textual Geographies builds on the resources of the HathiTrust Digital Library, using natural language processing and geocoding techniques to associate spatial data with textual references in about 10 million digitized volumes. The project integrates with the products and services of the HathiTrust Research Center and provides a sophisticated, intuitive user interface akin to Google Ngrams for visualization and analysis, as well as direct access to the underlying geographic data.

Associated Products

Nation, Ethnicity, and the Geography of British Fiction, 1880-1940 (Article)
Title: Nation, Ethnicity, and the Geography of British Fiction, 1880-1940
Author: Elizabeth F. Evans
Author: Matthew Wilkins
Abstract: Among the most pressing problems in modernist literary studies are those related to Britain's engagement with the wider world under empire and to its own rapidly evolving urban spaces in the years before the Second World War.1 In both cases, the literary-geographic imagination—or unconscious—of the period between 1880 and 1940 can help to shed light on how texts by British and British-aligned writers of the era understood these issues and how they evolved over time. At the highest level, how can we characterize the international and domestic geographies of British writing? What roles, if any, did cultural identity play in contemporary writers' spatial imagination? What locations were over- or under-represented in their work and how, if at all, does the answer change when we group writers by national origin or by perceived ethnicity? What shifts in geographic attention marked the transition from the late Victorian period to the interwar era of high modernism?
Year: 2018
Primary URL: http://10.22148/16.024
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Cultural Analytics

Textual Geographies (Web Resource)
Title: Textual Geographies
Author: Matthew Wilkins
Abstract: The Textual Geographies project presents, analyzes, and visualizes a collection of more than 14 billion named locations extracted from 10 million books and journals in English, German, Spanish, and Chinese published from the early days of print to the present.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://txtgeo.net/

---