The London Chronicles

During the summer of 2020, I worked with English Professor George Shuffelton on a textual analysis of the 15th-century London Chronicles focused on the significance of place names to residents of medieval London. As part of this research, I read the texts, identified and logged references to place names in a spreadsheet, and analyzed the data in Excel and Tableau. By the end of the project, my colleagues and I had collected over 3,000 place names from six different chronicles.

I initially started working on the project as a Digital Humanities Associate where I tested different software to see if it would be useful for location analysis. I experimented with several digital tools including Voyant and Edinburgh Geoparser to see how effective they were at recognizing and counting references to place names. I also worked with a colleague to write a Python program that would cross-reference The London Chronicles text with a gazetteer of place names from the Map of Early Modern London to produce a count of each place name. Unfortunately, none of these digital tools were effective due to the variations in medieval spelling of place names.

I then worked with two other students to complete a manual close read of six texts from The London Chronicles, recording each instance of a place name, its location in the text, the year, and its context. We standardized the spellings and checked each other’s work, and used a Python program to combine our data for each chronicle into one spreadheet. At the end, I then used Excel and Tableau to run a data analysis of our findings.

At the end of the project, we were able to order the locations by frequency, year, and event to see the associations that Londoners held for particular places. The next step for the project is to integrate our data collection with the Map of Early Modern London and create a spatial visualization of The London Chronicles.