Runner-up of the British Library Labs Research Award


During last week’s British Library Labs Symposium, the BL Labs team led by Mahendra Mahey announced the results for the BL Labs Awards in different categories recognising digital humanities activities involving data from the British Library.  The Palimpsest team is proud to have been selected as runner-up in the research awards category for our work on mining Edinburgh’s literary landscape and it’s fantastic to see our work recognised in this way.

Announcement of the British Library Labs Awards

Announcement of the British Library Labs Awards

The data behind the LitLong interfaces, which were developed by the SACHI lab as part of Palimpsest, was created by text mining out-of-copyright literary works as well as a select number of contemporary books, and included work from Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Muriel Spark and Irvine Welsh. It is also accessible via a search API. 111 books and over 12600 excerpts – over 20% of the Palimpsest data – were retrieved from the British Library Nineteenth Century Books collection, a set of over 65000 works covering philosophy, history, poetry and literature.  We would like to thank Mahendra Mahey and his team for their support in giving us access to the data.

All location mentions within the Palimpsest data were geo-referenced by the Edinburgh Geoparser to a fine-grained Edinburgh gazetteer, and excerpts containing them are linked back to the original electronic documents of its data provider, and in the case of the BL works to JISC Historical Text, to enable close reading.

The well deserved winners of the BL Labs research award are Professor Ian Gregory and his team working on the Spacial Humanities project. Their work examines the London based newspaper The Era made available by the British Library to determine how the Victorian Era discussed and portrayed disease, both temporally and spatially.

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