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

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 problem with this approach is that the geographies that can
be uncovered are solely associated with toponyms for which a coordinate-based
location can be found. 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.