The project’s main map, showing “pins” of novel passages mapped out throughout London. Map overlay courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.
Mapping Emotions of Victorian London is an experiment that visualizes data about thousands of passages from 1400 Victorian novels, using crowdsourcing to ascribe emotional sentiment to them. We’re proud to launch this third and final project as part of a three year Andrew W. Mellon funded research grant with Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis exploring the use and design of crowdsourcing to benefit academic research.
You can read more about the project from the Stanford scholars on their site, see our behind-the-scenes work over the last three years, read our paper from Museums and the Web 2015 (slides, paper), articles in the New York Times and FastCoDesign, and look out for two papers being presented at DH2015 in July.
Sevendials: The comments section of an example pin in the project, showing a reference card generated automatically with a Wikipedia url.An example literary passage from the project. Its mapped location appears on the left, alongside pins for other passages about the same location.
You can search project tags to find passages by specific authors, as with this example search for “Dickens.”
A closer look at the metadata for a literary passage in the project (just click on the ‘Pin Metadata’ arrow to expand). Shown are tags attributed to each pin, with the options for members of the public to add more tags, and the pin’s copyright information. This includes the percentage of Mechanical Turk users who found this particular passage ‘happy’ versus ‘fearful.’
