'Multiplicity embarrasses the eye': The digital mapping of literary Edinburgh

The Palimpsest project, undertaken at the universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews in 2014–2015, provides an example of this larger scale digital analysis. The Palimpsest project wanted to instead offer a different experience of literary Edinburgh – a more text-centred experience, that would enable users to explore narratives from different periods clustered at one location, or narratives that span locations across the city. The text processing work carried out for Palimpsest involved three main steps: the creation of an Edinburgh gazetteer; retrieval and ranking of Edinburgh-specific literature candidates; and textual analysis of the Edinburgh-centric literature. Each of these tasks presented conceptual and practical challenges. The text mining part of the system is done using a Palimpsest-adapted version of the Edinburgh Geoparser. In Palimpsest, look-up in the Edinburgh gazetteer is done before look-up in more general Ordnance Survey and Geonames gazetteers which the system accesses via Edina's Unlock Places web service.