The Geography of the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Text mining places in American and British novels

At Stanford’s Literary Lab we worked on a project to mine and map a corpus of several thousand nineteenth-century British and American novels in order to uncover macro patterns of how different places appeared over the course of the century. How did American space appear in British novels? What was the prominence of overseas colonies in literature and how did this change over the century? What were the different senses of place for the same location (ex. London)?