Presentation by James Butler & Christopher Donaldson at the 1st Lancaster Data Conversations 30 January.

1. Mining and mapping places with multiple names
James Butler & Christopher Donaldson
Lancaster University

2. 1901
Corpus of Lake District
Literature
1688 1789 1837
• 80 texts, comprising more than
1,500,000 words
• Mixture of canonical and non-
canonical literature about the Lake
District, mainly from c18 and c19
(78 out of 80 works)
• Mixture of genres, including
guidebooks, travelogues, novels,
poems, journals, and private letters
34 Texts
650K words
22 Texts
250K words
22 Texts
613K words

3. Sample sentence collocation: beautiful
‘Again entering the boat, we passed up the channel between Lord’s
Island the shore, from whence beautiful prospects are obtained of the
majestic form of Skiddaw, with the woods of Castlehead and
Cockshot Park in the foreground.’ (Edward Baines, A Companion to the
Lakes [1829] 121.)
±5 tokens: No place-names identified
±10 tokens: 2 place-names identified – Lord’s Island & Skiddaw
Within sentence: 4 place-names identified – Lord’s Island, Skiddaw, Castlehead &
Cockshot Park.
Average sentence length
Lake District corpus = 29.8 words
British National Corpus (BNC) = 16 words

4. from C. Grover, et al., ‘Use of the Edinburgh Geoparser for Georeferencing Digitized
Historical Collections’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 368 (2010) 3875–89.
Diagram of the Edinburgh Geoparser System

5. Example of input/output from the Edinburgh Geoparser
System

6. Geo-referenced Data from the Edinburgh Geoparser

7. Geo-referenced Data, Corrected

8. Bowness: ‘the curved headland’, from ON bogi/OE boga ‘bow’ and ON nes/OE naess
‘headland’
*Variant Historical Spellings: Bownus, Bawnas, Bonas, Bonus, Boulness
cf. D. Whaley, A Dictionary of Lake District Place Names
(Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 2006), 42.

9. Some of the common generic gazetteer geo-referenced issues…
Spatial misattribution.
Onomastic misassumption
Incorrect weighting
Just for the items that are found!

10. An extract of our custom manually-collected gazetteer for the corpus
Unique
ID
Topog.
Cat.
Primary Name Secondary Names Regional
Placement
CONISTON (lake):
Thurstan, Coniston Lake, Coniston Water, Thurston, Conistone, Conistone
Lake, Cunnistone Lake, Thurston Lake, Coniston Mere, Lake of Coniston,
Conis- ton, Conyngs Tun, Conyngeston, Thorstane's watter, Turstinus.

11. Geospatial categories chosen for flexibility and degree of universal referential
specificity

12. An extract from the latest iteration of the corpus - allowing referential
relationships to be analysed on a whole new level.
Lake, Vale, Specific - Farm, Waterfall