Week 2 // Lab: Reverse Engineering “Authorial London project”

I looked into the Authorial London project, which is a map of references to places in London found in works by writers who lived there. The image above is an example of a location in reference to the passage(s) it is used in, as well as how they structured the site information (rather than being another page, everything is on one). The project includes 1,600 passages from 193 works written between the 14th and 20th centuries by 47 authors. This helps identifying and categorizing literary, geographical, social standing, neighborhood, time period, and biographical factors.
https://authorial.stanford.edu/

• Sources (assets)
  • The historical maps are *geo-rectified versions of raster scans retrieved from Harvard College Library Digital Map Collection.
    • The link provided by the Authorial London site seems to be broken due to domain updates. I tried seeing if I could find it myself and I believe this would be an updated link to cite: Scanned Maps | Harvard Library.
    • *Also for reference, the term Georectification can be described as the process of taking an image of a map and referencing it to a spatial grid, as said by Lincoln Mullen part of the Spatial Humanities Workshop (entirely unrelated to this site)
  • Early 18th century map: “Taylor Map of London, England, 1723”; Metadata
  • Late 18th century map: “Bowles’s new pocket plan of the cities of London & Westminster with the borough of Southwark : comprehending the new buildings and other alterations to the year 1783”; Metadata
  • Late 19th century: “Indicator map of London: with the Recent improvements, 1880”; Metadata
  • This work extends the earlier “A Guide to Authorial London” project at Stanford University (2011), led by Martin Evans of the English Department. The biographical essays appearing here are those authored by Professor Evans for the original project.
• Processes (services) (as stated by the authors of the site themselves)
  • The initial list of London place references was created by reading ~40 chronologically diverse texts and gathering every place mentioned within today’s Greater London area, as defined by the London Orbital Motorway (M25). These references were then used to perform a machine search of the 690 text files by Authorial London writers available on Project Gutenberg. Hits from this search were used to generate a set of paragraph-length results tagged with the place references. Within these paragraphs, additional place references were identified, which were added to the place reference list. The elastic search was then re-run to generate an expanded set of results. Before inclusion on the site, every passage was read for relevance and to catch false machine identifications. It is important to note that the machine search omitted many twentieth-century texts owing to copyright restrictions. These texts were (and are) being read to cull relevant place references.
• Presentation (display) (as stated by the authors of the site themselves)
  • The 2795 place references (placeref) in text comprised 1013 distinct strings. These were resolved to 823 distinct locations (place) manually. For example the 117 references to the Thames, including “river Thames,” “Father Thames,” and “the silver Flood,” all map to the same coordinate geometry (a point in this case).
• From breaking the project down, I came up with multiple questions during my browsing:
  • Can any potential biases be identified in the source material selection, which could skew the representation of London in the project? And how could the authors make this transparent/mitigate this fact. For one thing they do have social status as a category, but there could be statistics behind the scenes.
  • What platform or software is used to create the interactive map? Or if it were made in-house, what is it based on? Are there any limitations or challenges associated with it?
  • In the terms of this class who is the producer and recipient of the “processes (services)“? Is the Authorial London site itself the service offered to others, or is it rather the framework and methodology it presents for creating similar projects for other locations?
• Questions during the in-class excersize:
  • Who made the website? What are their relationships to the institution?
    • This latest phase of the project is being developed at Stanford University Libraries 
      • Kenneth Ligda, PhD co-investigator & Editor
        Office of Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning (VPTL)
      • Karl Grossner, PhD co-investigator & lead developer
        Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR)
      • David McClure developer & Rails mentor
        Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR)
• Is the project open source/ open access?
  • The project is said to be designed as a platform that can be used to study other places as “Authorial {X},”. Though during my search, I cannot find a release or references to projects using the same format/code.