Analysis of the Map of Early Modern London Project

In this post I will examine how the Map of Early Modern London project demonstrates how digital humanities research and publication can help to make sense of a historical place and period that we think we understand (if we know English history, or Shakespeare, or London) but that can offer us new ways to think about the City of London and its role in culture and literature.

According to its website, the Map of Early Modern London Project is “comprised of four distinct, interoperable projects: a digital Map and gazetteer based on the 1560s Agas woodcut map of London; an Encyclopedia of London people, places, topics, and terms; a Library of marked-up texts rich in London toponyms; and a versioned edition of John Stow’s Survey of London.” (About MoEML web page)

The core of the research project is the Agas Map, a “bird’s-eye-view” of London printed from woodblocks in 1561 (What is the Agas Map web page) Using the map as a visual anchor to look at London society and culture in the 16th century, the research team has experimented with a variety of digital humanities approaches to ask research questions and examine why the City of London is so important to authors and artists of the period, as well as to the people who lived there.

Using the visual nature of the map, users can click on a section of the map to reveal places that are important for historical or cultural reasons. Those places are marked in red or yellow stars. When the user clicks on a red star (in Section B4, for example), one discovers that a place of interest is Shoe Lane, which was a center for printers and places of popular entertainment like cock fighting. (http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/SHOE1.htm) The entry on Shoe Lane  offers confident and well researched citations for the street’s history and associations with other London places over time.

While the visual map is clearly the centerpiece of the research project, the work has expanded in several text directions, including an encyclopedia of terms related to people and places, transcriptions of early modern performance texts, such as the Lord Mayor’s Shows. I find this area confusing – I cannot find an explanation for what a Lord Mayor’s Show *is*, so just reading that they are TEI-encoded, diplomatic transcriptions doesn’t mean anything to me. This might be an area where the research time might focus some effort on creating an introduction or contextual essay to give the reader a better understanding of its importance.

The research team appears to be particularly excited about a new area of the site that has to do with John Stow’s A Survey of London. This particular project is in process and so is not yet available to view, but the fact that the editors who are working on this section point to the fact that this will be published, and offer interested readers the chance to see the work as it develops and to give feedback strikes me as unusual and perhaps something that might distinguish digital scholarship from more traditional printed research.