Palimpsest: an Edinburgh Literary Cityscape

该项目涉及文学和信息学学者之间的合作，以开发一个名为palimpaste的交互式移动友好网站。选择palimpaste这个名字是为了唤起我们日常环境中多层次的想象力，概念性和历史性的城市景观，这是该资源寻求带来的生活。palimp本将通过网络资源，或在城市街道上通过智能手机或平板电脑，提供生动、令人回味和戏剧性的爱丁堡文学文本摘录。爱丁堡大学文学系于2012年启动了一个原型项目的开发，作为一种创新的方式，让人们与文学互动。原型是手工制作的；由于这种方法的费力性质，它只包括大约200个摘录。本项目旨在通过使用文本挖掘和可视化技术，极大地扩展重写本的范围和功能。本项目将探索利用文学方法、技巧和经验来开发文本挖掘的方法，以创造一种比目前可用的更深入的机器阅读方式。对在线资源的广泛搜索将用于编制爱丁堡文学文本的综合数据集。palimp本的最终用户在在线地图或城市中移动时，将有能力访问完整范围的摘录，并根据某些属性（如作者、类型和日期）过滤摘录。这个功能既能满足一般的文学兴趣，也能满足学术兴趣。在后期阶段，我们将考虑如何提高文本挖掘能力，并为项目数据集添加更多属性。可扩展的财产范围将有助于发展出一幅越来越精细的爱丁堡作品、作者和时期的图景，以及一幅城市各个部分所投资的文学意义密度的图景。重写本中引用了爱丁堡文学城市景观的特殊强度，正如罗伯特·路易斯·史蒂文森在他的《风景如画的笔记》中所描述的那样：“因此，在爱丁堡低矮的洞穴和高耸的阁楼中，人们可能会回到镇上冒险的黑暗通道，用冬天关于火的故事来寒心：这些故事非常贴切和有特色，不仅是旧生活，而且是那部分建筑自然的构成。”史蒂文森接着讲述了一些令人毛骨悚然的故事，其中一些现在比其他的更熟悉了，关于执事布罗迪、搬运工贝格比、伯克和黑尔。最近，伊恩·兰金也将自己的小说灵感来源于史蒂文森和爱丁堡，他说：“我欠罗伯特·路易斯·史蒂文森和他出生的这座城市很多。在某种程度上，他们都改变了我的生活。如果没有爱丁堡的分裂性，史蒂文森可能永远不会想出《化身博士》；如果没有《化身博士》，我可能永远也不会想出我的另一个自我——侦探探长约翰·雷布斯。和史蒂文森一样，兰金的感激之情与这座城市本身的本质和它所激发的小说交织在一起。文学与城市交织在一起，城市与文学交织在一起，因为它们相互塑造了彼此的形态。在这个项目中，palimp本将利用从现代早期到20世纪的爱丁堡文学文本，但该资源也将有能力在其他地方进行重建。其目的是通过将大量的文学文本与他们的背景进行地理参考，该网站将揭示一系列的城市景观，这将使学者和公众与城市环境及其文学产生新的联系。重写本将鼓励我们反思、质疑和赞美我们所生活的城市社区、文化和环境。

This project involves a collaboration between literary and informatics scholars in order to develop an interactive, mobile-friendly website called Palimpsest. The name Palimpsest was chosen to evoke the multi-layered imaginative, conceptual and historical cityscapes of our everyday settings that the resource seeks to bring to life. Palimpsest will provide access to vivid, evocative and dramatic excerpts of a wide range of geolocated Edinburgh-based literary texts either via the web resource, or in the city streets via a smartphone or tablet.The University of Edinburgh's literature department initiated a prototype project's development in 2012 as an innovative means of engaging people with literature. The prototype was manually curated; due to the laborious nature of this method it only includes around 200 excerpts. This project aims to greatly extend the scope and functions of Palimpsest through employing text mining and visualisation techniques.This project will explore the ways in which text mining can be developed through drawing on literary methods, skills and experience in order to create a more in-depth means of machine reading than is currently available. An extensive search of online resources will be used to compile a comprehensive dataset of Edinburgh-based literary texts. The end-users of Palimpsest will have the capacity to access the full range of excerpts as they move around the online map or the city itself and to filter the excerpts according to certain properties, such as author, genre and date. This function will respond both to more general literary interests and to scholarly ones. In the later stages we will consider how to improve the text mining capacities and add more properties to the project dataset. The extendable range of properties will help to develop an increasingly fine-grained picture of the Edinburgh of particular works, authors and periods and a picture of the density of literary significance with which all parts of the city have been invested.Palimpsest enlists the particular intensities of Edinburgh's literary cityscape, as is described by Robert Louis Stevenson in his Picturesque Notes: 'So, in the low dens and high-flying garrets of Edinburgh, people may go back upon dark passages in the town's adventures, and chill their marrow with winter's tales about the fire: tales that are singularly apposite and characteristic, not only of the old life, but of the very constitution of built nature in that part'. Stevenson then goes on to tell chilling tales, some now more familiar than others, of Deacon Brodie, Begbie the Porter, and Burke and Hare. More recently, Ian Rankin has in turn jointly credited Stevenson and Edinburgh with the inspiring of his own fiction: 'I owe a great debt to Robert Louis Stevenson and to the city of his birth. In a way they both changed my life. Without Edinburgh's split nature Stevenson might never have dreamed up Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and without Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde I might never have come up with my own alter ego Detective Inspector John Rebus'. As with Stevenson, in Rankin's debt of gratitude are intertwined the nature of the city itself and the fiction it has inspired. The literature is shot through with the city, and the city with the literature, as they have reciprocally shaped each other's forms.In this project Palimpsest will draw on Edinburgh-based literary texts from the early modern period to the twentieth century, but the resource will also have the capacity to be recreated in other places. The aim is that by georeferencing a wide range of literary texts to their settings, the website will reveal a range of cityscapes that will newly engage scholars and the public with the urban environment and its literature. Palimpsest will encourage us to reflect on, question and celebrate the urban communities, cultures and environments in which we live.