I chose to analyze Authorial London for this reverse engineer project. It is a project collect and mapped places in London that writers have lived and worked in.
Breakdown of the project: (The following information is obtained from the project website.)
Sources:
- corpus includes roughly 1,600 passages from 193 works written between the 14th and 20th centuries by 47 authors from 12 literary communities (periods).
- The historical maps are retrieved from Harvard College Library Digital Map Collection
Process:
For location information, initial list of London place references was created by reading diverse texts and using a machine search of Authorial London writers’ text files on Project Gutenberg. Then, 2795 place references in text are resolved to 823 distinct locations manually. Neighborhoods are vaguely defined, with centroids recorded from OpenStreetMap labels, and Voronoi polygons used for map navigation.
Presentation:
The web was built with a Ruby-on-Rails and PostgreSQL database backend, and a hybrid set of JavaScript front-end technologies. ElasticSearch indexes the entire corpus, and Apache Solr is used for free-text search. Thus information can be freely searched by author, work and places.
Questions:
What are the components? (i.e essay, interactive map, etc)
The project is presented as a assembled website, including an interactive map that noted the places related to authors in London. And a search system that can search places by information of author, place and their works.
Is the project open source/ open access?
The project is open sourced. Moreover, it has been developed as the first instance of a reusable platform known as “Authorial {X}.” This platform will allow researchers and college instructors to easily instantiate a similar site for any place of interest. Information about authors, texts, references to places within texts etc. can be inputted. Apart from that, the site is designed to be open to input and expansion, allowing for the addition of new writers and works by scholars and readers of London literature.
New question: I was wondering, in what ways does a corpus take into account linguistic variations such as pre-modern spelling, intentional spelling mistakes, and poetic descriptions of place names? Also, another question I had is, as the program has mentioned it is a platform that may expand to other locations, how is the system going to adapt to different geological features?
