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This symposium considers how the digital humanities (DH), which relies on computer technology to interpret data and present conclusions, can enhance our understanding of tourism history. It begins with an introduction that defines DH, considers how DH can assist the way in which we think about tourism, and discusses the strengths and limitations of applications like text mining and digital mapping. This is followed by a review of the scholarship on digital mapping and the humanities which also highlights some of the important themes and projects that have sprung from this dynamic interdisciplinary dialogue. The latter half of the symposium is dedicated to two project reports. The first describes how the Grand Tour Project at Stanford University is utilizing a database of digital entries which combine digitised text and structured data to illuminate connections between eighteenth-century travellers. The second discusses how the Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities project at Lancaster University is using geo-spatial technologies to examine the relationship between historically evolving ideas about tourist destinations in the Lake District and the contemporary management of such sites. The symposium concludes with some contemplation of the future developments in the realm of digital humanities and tourism history.

We analyse silence and tranquillity in historical and contemporary corpora to explore ways landscapes were -- and are -- perceived in the Lake District National Park in England. Through macro and microreading we develop a taxonomy of aural experiences, and explore how changes to categories of silence from our taxonomy -- for instance, the overall decline in mentions of absolute silence -- provide clues to changes in the land- and soundscape of the Lake District. Modern authors often contrast silence with anthropogenic sounds, while historical authors adhere to a cultural construction where the Lake District is presented as a tranquil area by ignoring industrial sounds. Using sentiment analysis we show that silence and tranquil sounds in our corpora are, as a whole, more positively associated than random text from the corpora, with this difference being especially marked in contemporary descriptions. Focusing closely on individual texts allows us to illustrate how this increased positivity can be related to the emergence of silence and tranquillity as valuable components of landscape. Mapping our corpora confirmed the influence of Wordsworth's writing on descriptions of silence; and revealed the co-location of pockets of tranquillity near to transport arteries in contemporary descriptions.

Corpus linguistics enables the analysis of patterns in large bodies of written material. The use of this approach to trace discourses about infant mortality in all of the text published by four newspapers in England and Wales between 1870 and 1900 detects systematic variations in views about infant welfare by locality. It also reveals some of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in interrogating digitized text with linguistic tools in historical research.

The accurate automated identification of named places is a major concern for scholars in the digital humanities, and especially for those engaged in research that depends upon the gazetteer-led recognition of specific aspects. The field of onomastics examines the linguistic roots and historical development of names, which have for the most part only standardised into single officially recognised forms since the late nineteenth century. Even slight spelling variations can introduce errors in geotagging techniques, and these differences in place-name spellings are thus vital considerations when seeking high rates of correct geospatial identification in historical texts. This article offers an overview of typical name-based variation that can cause issues in the accurate geotagging of any historical resource. The article argues that the careful study and documentation of these variations can assist in the development of more complete onymic records, which in turn may inform geotaggers through a cycle of variational recognition. It demonstrates how patterns in regional naming variation and development, across both specific and generic name elements, can be identified through the historical records of each known location. The article uses examples taken from a digitised corpus of writing about the English Lake District, a collection of 80 texts that date from between 1622 and 1900. Four of the more complex spelling-based problems encountered during the creation of a manual gazetteer for this corpus are examined. Specifically, the article demonstrates how and why such variation must be expected, particularly in the years preceding the standardisation of place-name spellings. It suggests how procedural developments may be undertaken to account for such georeferential issues in the Named Entity Recognition strategies employed by future projects. Similarly, the benefits of such multi-genre corpora to assist in completing onomastic records is also shown through examples of new name forms discovered for prominent sites in the Lake District. This focus is accompanied by a discussion of the influence of literary works on place-name standardisation – an aspect not typically accounted for in traditional onomastic study – to illustrate the extent to which authorial interests in regional toponymic histories can influence linguistic development.

It is increasingly acknowledged that the Digital Humanities have placed too much emphasis on data creation and that the major priority should be turning digital sources into contributions to knowledge. While this sounds relatively simple, doing it involves intermediate stages of research that enhance digital sources, develop new methodologies and explore their potential to generate new knowledge from the source. While these stages are familiar in the social sciences they are less so in the humanities. In this paper we explore these stages based on research on the British Library’s Nineteenth Century Newspaper Collection, a corpus of many billion words that has much to offer to our understanding of the nineteenth century but whose size and complexity makes it difficult to work with В последнее время становится все очевиднее, что цифровые гуманитарные науки чрезмерно ориентированы на создание новых данных, в то время как их главным приоритетом должно быть использование цифровых ресурсов для обогащения знаний. Хотя это звучит относительно просто, для достижения данной цели необходимо провести исследования промежуточной стадии для расширения цифровых ресурсов, развития новых методов и изучения их потенциала для получения новых знаний из имеющихся ресурсов. И хотя эта стадия исследования уже известна в области социальных наук, гуманитарные науки знакомы с ней в меньшей степени. Данная работа представляет собой изучение такой промежуточной стадии на примере исследования коллекции газет XIX века Британской библиотеки – корпуса текста объемом в несколько миллиардов слов, который предоставляет собой ценный материал о жизни XIX века, но в силу своего объема и сложной структуры является неудобным в обращении

This paper uses a combination of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and corpus linguistic analysis to extract and analyse disease related keywords from the Registrar-General's Decennial Supplements. Combined with known mortality figures, this provides, for the first time, a spatial picture of the relationship between the Registrar-General's discussion of disease and deaths in England and Wales in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Techniques such as collocation, density analysis, the Hierarchical Regional Settlement matrix and regression analysis are employed to extract and analyse the data resulting in new insight into the relationship between the Registrar-General's published texts and the changing mortality patterns during this time.

Although the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has a long history in archaeology, spatial technologies have been rarely used to analyse the content of textual collections. A newly developed approach termed Geographic Text Analysis (GTA) is now allowing the semi-automated exploration of large corpora incorporating a combination of Natural Language Processing techniques, Corpus Linguistics, and GIS. In this article we explain the development of GTA, propose possible uses of this methodology in the field of archaeology, and give a summary of the challenges that emerge from this type of analysis.

The spatial humanities constitute a rapidly developing research field that has the potential to create a step-change in the ways in which the humanities deal with geography and geographical information. As yet, however, research in the spatial humanities is only just beginning to deliver the applied contributions to knowledge that will prove its significance. Demonstrating the potential of innovations in technical fields is, almost always, a lengthy process, as it takes time to create the required datasets and to design and implement appropriate techniques for engaging with the information those datasets contain. Beyond this, there is the need to define appropriate research questions and to set parameters for interpreting findings, both of which can involve prolonged discussion and debate. The spatial humanities are still in early phases of this process. Accordingly, the purpose of this special issue is to showcase a set of exemplary studies and research projects that not only demonstrate the field's potential to contribute to knowledge across a range of humanities disciplines, but also to suggest pathways for future research. Our ambition is both to demonstrate how the application of exploratory techniques in the spatial humanities offers new insights about the geographies embedded in a diverse range of texts (including letters, works of literature, and official reports) and, at the same time, to encourage other scholars to integrate these techniques in their research.

The challenge for digital historians is deceptively simple: it is to do good history that combines the computer’s ability to search and summarize, with the researcher’s ability to interpret and argue. This involves both developing an understanding of how to use digital sources appropriately, and more importantly, using digital sources and methods to deliver new scholarship that enhances our understanding of the past. There are plenty of sources available; the challenge is to make use of them to deliver on their potential. There have been false dawns for digital history, or “history and computing,” in the past (Boonstra et al. 2004). Until very recently, computers were primarily associated with performing calculations on numbers. This has resulted in them becoming fundamental tools in fields such as economic history, historical demography and, through the use of geographical information systems (GIS)1, historical geography. These are, however, relatively small fields within the discipline as a whole and much of the work that has been done in them has taken place outside of History departments in, for example, Economics, Sociology, and Geography. As most historians work with texts, it is hardly surprising that this style of computing has made little impact on the wider discipline. Within the last few years, however, there has been a fundamental shift in computing in which, put simply, computers have moved from being number crunching machines to become an information technology where much of the information that they contain is in textual form. This has been associated with the creation of truly massive amounts of digital textual content. This ranges from social media and the internet, to private sector digitization projects such as Google Books and the Gale/Cengage collections, to the more limited investment from the academic and charitable sectors (Thomas and Johnson 2013). Thus, computers are now inextricably concerned with texts – exactly the type of source that is central to the study of history. As a consequence, many historians have become “digital historians” almost without realizing it through making use of the vast number of sources that are now available from their desktop. So is everything in the garden that is digital history currently rosy? The answer, judging by work such as Hitchcock (2013) and the responses to it (Knights 2013; Prescott 2013), seems to be a resounding no. Many criticisms are centered on the digital sources themselves, whose quality is lower than that might be hoped. Digitizing a document is usually a two-stage process: first a digital image of the document is created as a bitmap, then the textual content is encoded as machine readable text. The two are then often brought together such that a user can type a search term, this is located in the text, and then the user can be shown the appropriate image of the page. The first of the two stages is relatively simple using a scanner or camera and, if done properly, only results in relatively minor abstractions from the original as the result is a facsimile copy. The second stage, however, is hugely problematic involving either the text being manually typed, or optical character recognition (OCR) software being used to automatically identify letters from the bitmap image. Both of these are slow, expensive, and errorprone. OCR tends to be used on largescale projects: it is faster and cheaper but tends to result in far more errors. Whatever approach is used, checking the results is very difficult. Common approaches involve carefully typing up“gold standard”samples of parts of the source and comparing these with bulk-entered material to give a percentage of words or letters that have errors. Understanding what the consequences of these scores mean in practice is difficult. Even without error, if the text is removed from the page scans then they are heavily abstracted from the original and much potentially useful information is lost. Once created, digital sources are often interrogated using techniques that are not properly understood but are nevertheless used uncritically. The classic example that combines both the data capture and uncritical use problems is typing a keyword search into a web interface, which returns a list of hits sorted by “relevance.” As Hitchcock (2013) points out, most historians using digital sources do this without having any idea of the implications either of the data capture that created the digital copy of the source, and thus whether the search will miss words as a result of spelling variations derived from digitization errors, or of how the search engines decides what is – and, more importantly, is not – “relevant.” While using search engines may be problematic, in reality they are the only digital tool that most historians use, indeed there is a lack of widely used techniques that can be used to interrogate, summarize, and understand the large volumes of material that are available. So what do digital historians need to do? The answer, I would argue, is to remember that they are first and foremost historians and that historians fundamentally are in the business of taking complex, incomplete sources that are full of biases and errors, and interpreting them critically to develop an argument that answers a research question. Digital sources do not change this

As Northern Ireland moves further from the period of conflict known as the ‘Troubles’, attention has increasingly focussed on the social and material vestiges of that conflict; Northern Ireland is still a deeply-divided society in terms of residential segregation between Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists, and urban areas are still, indeed increasingly, characterised by large defensive walls, known as ‘peacelines’, which demark many of the dividing lines between the two communities. In recent years a body of literature has emerged which has highlighted the spatial association between patterns of conflict fatality and proximity to peacelines. This paper assesses that relationship, arguing that previous analyses have failed to fully take account of the ethnic complexity of inner-city Belfast in their calculations. When this is considered, patterns of fatality were more intense within the cores or ‘sanctuaries’ of highly segregated Catholic and Protestant communities rather than at the fracture zones or ‘interfaces’ between them where peacelines have always been constructed. Using census data at a high spatial resolution, this paper also provides the first attempt to provide a definition of the ‘interface’ in clear geographic terms, a spatial concept that has hitherto appeared amorphous in academic studies and media coverage of Belfast during and since the Troubles. In doing so it embodies both the material and demographic aspects of social division in Northern Ireland, and suggests an urgent need to reappraise the true role of these forms of social boundary in influencing patterns of violent conflict.

In order to better support the text mining of historical texts, we propose a combination of complementary techniques from Geographical Information Systems, computational and corpus linguistics. In previous work, we have described this as `visual gisting' to extract important themes from text and locate those themes on a map representing geographical information contained in the text. Here, we describe the steps that were found necessary to apply standard analysis and resolution tools to identify place names in a specific corpus of historical texts. This task is seen as an initial and prerequisite step for further analysis and comparison by combining the information we extract from a corpus with information from other sources, including other text corpora. The process is intended to support close reading of historical texts on a much larger scale by highlighting using exploratory and data-driven approaches which parts of the corpus warrant further close analysis. Our case study presented here is from a corpus of Lake District travel literature. We discuss the customisations that we have to make to existing tools to extract placename information and visualise it on a map.