What lurks behind the literary landmarks of Victorian London? Fear? Joy? Ambiguity?
In a new data mining project, a Stanford University research collective has sought to map the British capital’s emotional geography by categorising what feelings or sensations common settings convey in the novels of Dickens, Thackeray, Austen and 738 other mostly 19th-century authors.
The effort, ‘Mapping Emotions in Victorian London’, recently put online, is part of a growing movement in the humanities to harness digital technology for cultural analysis like treating books as data to create literary geography.
Dickens and other passagesFor its project, the Stanford Literary Lab, which uses computational criticism to analyse literature in a statistical way, asked anonymous participants to judge whether 167 places that are named in 4,363 literary passages in 1,402 books conveyed Dreadful London, London in the Light, or A Day in the Life of Old London, among other categories.
Why? Because, with today’s digital technology, it could be done. But a better answer, scholars say, is that it is a way of exploring the computer’s nearly limitless possibilities for textual analysis, which will find increasingly valuable future applications.
It broadly allows for collection of information and empowerment with the public to do research not otherwise possible, said Gabriel Wolfenstein, a Stanford historian on the project.
In one major application of such technology that pointed the way ahead in 1999, Franco Moretti, a director of the Stanford Literary Lab, published Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900, charting relationships between literature and geography.
In Mapping Emotions in Victorian London, click, for example, on a digital pin marking the site of the Old Bailey Courthouse, London’s central criminal court from 1673 to 1913, and this quotation from Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ in 1859 pops up: The dead man disposed of, and the crowd being under the necessity of providing some other entertainment for itself, another brighter genius (or perhaps the same) conceived the humour of impeaching casual passers-by, as Old Bailey spies, and wreaking vengeance on them. Clearly, Old Bailey is Dreadful London.
But click on another pin on the map, at Belgrave Square, and read this sunnier passage from ‘Married or Single?’ from 1895 by Bithia Mary Croker: Under these favourable circumstances, he soon discovered what he required. A superb mansion in Belgrave Square, with large suites of reception rooms, 20 bedrooms, hot and cold water, electric light, speaking-tubes, stabling for 12 horses, and, in short, to quote the advertisement, with everything desirable for a nobleman’s or gentleman’s family. Unquestionably, London in the Light.
User-drivenThe Stanford Literary Lab was founded in 2010 under the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. ‘Mapping Emotions in Victorian London’ uses a platform, Historypin, which was developed by a London non-profit called Shift, with initial support from Google to create a global archive where users can post and share photographs and other historical data.
There were some surprises in the London research, said Ryan Heuser, an associate research director for the Stanford Literary Lab.
We thought fear would be linked to poverty, Heuser said. But poorer sections of the city did not fare particularly badly in the literature. Fear was more associated with ancient markets and prisons, he added. The crowdsourcing for the project, the anonymous workers who categorised the literary references was performed by Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online labour force. — New York Times News Service.
