Palimpsest: Improving Assisted Curation of Loco-specific Literature

This paper reports on interdisciplinary work carried out as part of the Palimpsest project, focusing on mining literary works set in Edinburgh, a UNESCO City of Literature. The focus of Palimpsest is to harness text mining techniques to scour accessible literary works and find those which mention Edinburgh or places within it. We ground “loco-specific” passages of text by identifying their latitudes and longitudes, so that both scholars and the public can geographically explore their fictional city. The project is a collaboration between literary scholars studying the use of place in literature and computer science experts in text mining and information visualisation. Through a range of maps and accessible visualisations, users will ultimately be able to explore the spatial relations of the literary city at particular times in its history, in the works of particular authors, or across different eras and writers.
In this paper we present an overview of the project architecture, and describe in more detail the assisted curation process adopted in the project. It involves automatic retrieval and ranking of accessible literature according to its loco-specificity followed by manual selection of ranked documents, resulting in a set of literary works identified as set in Edinburgh. We report on the fine-tuning of the retrieval and ranking prototype based on literary scholar annotators' feedback.