Mapping Lake District Culture

Pilot version. Please note: This site is still under development. It does contain data errors, software problems and design issues that will be resolved in due course.

This site pilots the use of geographical technologies to map Lake District literature. The aim of the site is to allow users to ask the basic question "what has been written about which places?" This can be done in one of three ways:

1. Click on the map to see a brief phrase containing every mention of the place name in the collection. These are given in the top-right of the screen. Following the hyperlink on the author's name takes you to the paragraph in the text that the phrase was taken from.

2. Find a place using an alphabetical list of place names which again provides the phrase in which each mention of the place name occurs. Then either click on the place name to centre the map on that place, or click on the name of the source to be taken to the paragraph in which that mention occurs.

3. Read an individual text. Click on a place name to centre the map on that place. Click on the map to then see phrases that include other mentions of the place name as described in 1 (above).

Current texts:

The site currently only has a small subset of Lake District literature but will soon be expanded to include a large amount of material under funding gained from the European Research Council on the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in the Digital Humanities.

Current content includes:

• Gray: Thomas Gray's Journal of his tour of the Lake District (1769)
• Coleridge: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's tour of the Lake District (August, 1802)
• WW Dir & Info: William Wordsworth's Directions and Information for the Tourist from his Guide to the Lakes
• WW Guide 1: William Wordsworth's Description of the Scenery of the Lakes. Section First. View of the Country as Formed by Nature. (lines 1-90.) Taken from his Guide to the Lakes
• The titles of William Wordsworth's poems that include place names. We do not include the complete poems. The titles are provide in the format: Title of Anthology, Year: Place Name.Title of Poem .

Note that some of these sources include mentions of places that are a long way from the Lake District. In most cases we have also mapped these.

Legend:

Ambleside: A place name. If this is underlined it is a hyperlink that will centre the map on the place. If it is not underlined when it might be expected to be it may mean that we do not have a location for this name.
Dr. Thomas Wharton: A person's name
Close by the Sea, lone sentinel,: Text from a poem
[p]: The end of a paragraph (in a phrase)
[title]: The words that follow are in a title or sub-heading (in a phrase, terminated by a [p])
[line]: The start of a new line of a poem (in a phrase)

Important: We use points to describe the locations of features such as mountains, lakes, rivers and settlements and thus these points may not be in the exact location that might be expected.Some interpretation by the reader may be required. Additionally, this still work in progress and does contain errors.

Acknowledgements:

This site builds on an earlier British Academy funded project "Mapping the Lakes: A literary GIS" which concentrated on mapping the tours of Gray and Coleridge. Additional content was added by Kirsten Hansen while she was an intern at the Department of History, Lancaster University - we are very grateful to her for her work and to Prof. Robert Schwartz (Mt Holyoke College, USA) and the Department of Hiistory at Lancaster for arranging this internship.