Qualitative Geographies in Digital Texts: Representing Historical Spatial Identities in The Lake District

Abstract

Techniques for extracting place names (toponyms) from texts and using them to conduct analyses of the geographies within the texts are becoming reasonably well established. These are generally referred to as Geographical Text Analysis (GTA) and allow us to ask questions about the geographies within a corpus. The limitation of this approach is that the geographies that can be uncovered are solely associated with toponyms for which a coordinate-based location can be assigned. While this method is valuable, it is effectively a quantitative representation of the geographies associated with named places. Other representations of geography are ignored. To complement GTA, we need to develop techniques that are capable of representing the more qualitative representations of geography that are found within texts. Drawing on the Corpus of Lake District Writing, this paper presents some initial ideas about how this can be achieved, primarily by using techniques from corpus linguistics.