Discovering the nineteenth-century soundscape through text mining: A big data approach

This project conducts a digital study of Britain's historical soundscape. Through a fusion of
multidisciplinary approaches adopted from socio-economic history, corpus linguistics and human
geography, it responds to calls for more developed understandings of humans' sensory
engagements with the environment (Pijanowski et al. 2011), and for the advancement of digitallyorientated sound studies (Clement 2016). The British Library's (BL) unparalleled text and sound
archives make it an ideal partner for this project. In addition to making significant contributions to
multi-media digital history studies, the project's methodology inspires its engagement with the BL
to explore how these approaches can allow new access to and means of interpreting their
collections.
This project combines traditional historical approaches to text with big data methodologies to
examine the representation of sound in a major nineteenth-century collection. The project will
address ESRC concerns including: mental health (a strategic priority), inter-disciplinary research (an
NWSSDTP priority) and "supporting research that exploits the UK's excellent data resources"
(Strategic Plan p. 7). It asks:
1. What can we learn about the historical British soundscape from a large corpus of
nineteenth-century writing?
2. How can digital approaches be utilised alongside traditional historical research methods to
generate new understandings about the historical soundscape and its relevance to today's
acoustic experiences?
3. How did the experience and representation of sound change in light of industrialisation,
urbanisation and tourism over the course of the nineteenth century?
4. How did these changes to the soundscape impact on contemporary interactions with, and
attitudes towards, the natural world and urban environments?
5. How did exposure to different types of sound affect people's wellbeing and mental health
in both positive and negative ways, and what can these historical lessons teach us about
today's experiences?
6. What contributions can digital humanities approaches to the BL's collections make to a
heritage organisation's activities?