• Katie Mishler

University College Dublin

Keywords: text mapping, ArcGIS, gothic literature

The public-facing digital humanities project Mapping Gothic Dublin: 1822-1900, a collaboration between the UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics and Museum of Literature Ireland, is the first large-scale study of Irish gothic literature within the context of nineteenth-century Dublin. During this time, the capital city was characterised by social change, political upheaval, and migration after the Act of Union (1800), as well as technological progress, modernisation, and artistic creativity. The project’s curated multimedia outputs illustrate the duality between the written city found in literature and the lived, physical reality of Dublin across time, resulting in an understanding of urban space as a spectral, layered palimpsest.

Using the tools of ARCGis and archival research, this project thus seeks to create a visualisation of the geospatial and sociohistorical features of gothic texts by nineteenth-century Irish writers that are set in Dublin (and, in the case of creative and intellectual migrants like Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker and, in London). However, certain challenges arise when mapping gothic fiction, which, with its ghostly hauntings and historical interruptions, is by its very nature both temporally and spatially inconsistent. 

The city in literature is both an imaginative entity and a reflection of lived reality, but the haunted city has an added layer of spectrality that is inherent within the nature of supernatural hauntings. This  paper will outline the temporal and spatial anomalies of the gothic, and lead to a theory of mapping spectrality. The considerations of the geospatial and sociopolitical dimensions of the urban gothic are timely, as fears over proximity and contagion are resonant within COVID-era public health restrictions and their impact on imaginary and lived cities.

• Mike Bowman

Birkbeck, University of London

Digital resources and computational techniques have received limited attention in art history, in part due to the visual and material nature of many of the primary sources with which art historians engage. My paper aims to contribute to filling that gap, exploring their value through looking at the titles of works of art. Titles are closely associated with the works they name. As the semiotician Jose Besa Cambrupi has discussed, titles also act meta-linguistically, saying something about those works and contributing to the meanings they are given (Besa Cambrupi 2002). As self-contained textual units, titles are well-suited to the sorts of statistical approaches used by scholars to analyse texts. Looking at titles in aggregate allows me to bring these techniques into art history and to explore ways in which those meta-linguistic functions have been elaborated.

Drawing on the online collections of 37 modern and contemporary art museums in 17 countries I have assembled a database of 61,000 titles covering the decades from the 1900s to the 2010s. To investigate and interpret this material I turn to the statistical techniques of correspondence analysis, topic modelling and parts of speech tagging. Using these techniques individually and in combination, I read the language used in titles in terms of a long-term narrative within modern and contemporary art as artistic interests came and went and were re-inflected, and as epistemic perspectives on the kinds of knowledge that art can or should engender changed.

My work shows how computational techniques can bring new ways of seeing and new kinds of knowledge into art history. I will argue they give art historians a way of working with primary sources that are inherently noisy. There are also lessons for those working in the digital humanities from my work.

Key words: Art History, Topic Modelling, Parts of Speech Tagging

References:

José Bepa Cambrupi, Nouveaux actes semiotiques N^o 82: Les fonctions du titre, (Limoges: Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 2002).

• Gareth Cole

Loughborough University

Keywords: Ordnance; Clerks; Bureaucratisation

Abstract:

This paper will show how and when the Office of Ordnance became a global body in the eighteenth century. By mapping the position of facilities, staffing levels, and how staffing costs changed, it is possible to visually demonstrate the growth and reduction of the Ordnance over the long eighteenth century.

As the Government department responsible for supplying the British navy and army with arms and ammunition, having a global network of facilities was critical to the success of the Ordnance’s mission. However, this paper will demonstrate that the Ordnance was only truly a global department by the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Before that, it’s growth and retraction can be matched to the success and failure of British forces in the numerous wars of the eighteenth century.

By mapping not only the position, but also the number of staff, and wage costs it is possible to demonstrate the importance (or otherwise) of individual facilities. Although staffing and wages can only be a proxy for importance, they are useful to show where the Ordnance felt it was important to expend its finite resources.

Using Ordnance establishment and employment records as the main source base I have created a database of Ordnance employees in the late eighteenth century which enables easier analysis of career paths as well as changes in pay scales in the period. By adding in the latitude and longitude of the Ordnance facilities it is possible to overlay this data onto maps to give a visual representation of Ordnance employment patterns. This mapping of employment patterns gives a different perspective on the life of eighteenth century government employees and the increase in the bureaucratisation of the eighteenth century British state.