Palimpsest: an Edinburgh Literary Cityscape

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.

Palimpsest will add an exciting new dimension to the cultural life of the first place to be granted UNESCO World City of Literature status. Edinburgh's distinctive literary history, and the involved relationship of the city to the literary works written in and on it, is a matter of significant and widespread public interest, being the focus for a city council-funded Writers' Museum, literary tours and numerous existing writers' and readers' groups. The establishment of the City of Literature Trust in 2004 gave this literary culture a distinctive public face and a coordinating body, which has been active in pursuit of its aims ever since. Palimpsest's innovative and comprehensive mapping of literary place, its generation of a large scale database to underpin that mapping, its striking and accessible visualisations will furnish professional and voluntary bodies concerned with the city's literary life with a newly enlarged and deepened picture of literary Edinburgh and a new and extensive resource on which to draw. In the same way, Palimpsest online will offer writers inspired by the long tradition of Edinburgh-focused literature an unprecedented resource for exploring that tradition in all its fullness, while those who use the site on smartphone or tablet while actively exploring the streets of Edinburgh will be offered new ways of discovering and engaging with the city's literary topography and inheritance. The same opportunities, of course, will be available to the many readers fascinated not just by the work of Edinburgh authors but by their books' generation of, and interaction with, the city's literary topography. The database and web interface will offer such readers a variety of engaging and accessible ways to explore the development of that topography over the centuries, while those in the city will be able to unearth layers of literary history from its streets and spaces as they navigate them, thus rewriting the way in which a literary cityscape might be encountered. This latter group, of course, includes both residents and a substantial proportion of the three and a half million tourist visitors who come to Edinburgh each year.

In order for this potential for impact to be realised, we will ensure that Palimpsest is tailored and attuned to the needs and activities of its non-academic beneficiaries. In the early months of the project we will undertake briefing meetings with the City of Literature Trust, relevant officers at the City of Edinburgh Council, Edinburgh World Heritage and enterprises - such as tour companies - who draw directly on Edinburgh's literary history. We will also use existing networks and our interactive web presence and social media during project development to reach the further constituency of Edinburgh's reading public. Further to this, we will organise a series of public engagement activities during the lifetime of the project to build awareness and promote interaction. We are in discussions to hold events at the International Book Festival in 2014 and the Science Festival in 2015, and we will also organise readings, a 'meet the author' live interpretation event, and - under the title 'The Burgh' - a writing competition and storytelling events for which participants will take their cue from a historic map of Edinburgh of their own choosing. These will take place during the final nine months of the project, and will be documented in the blog; winning competition entries and a selection of audio recordings of the stories will be published on the Palimpsest website. In the final months, such events will provide a focus for the launch of the website and the app, and will also help us in securing media coverage to further reach our constituencies.