Dr Christopher Donaldson has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Grant as a Co-Investigator for the project 'Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities: A Deep Map of the English Lake District'.
Headed by Principal Investigator Professor Ian Gregory (Lancaster University), the project responds to the need for scholarship and resources to advance the use of geographical technologies in humanities research. Specifically, the project is developing an open-source, online resource, which will combine oral, written and visual materials to enable new research into the cultural history of the Lake District.
This resource is being developed alongside, and is informing, the research monograph that Dr Donaldson is currently completing: A Literary Atlas of Victorian Lakeland. This exemplar study in deep mapping synthesises data from a wide range of materials, including the Martineau Papers at the Cadbury Research Library, in order to examine the cultural canonisation of the Lake District during the nineteenth century.
Awarded £230,954 (of which £18,000 is allocated to Dr Donaldson), the project will bring together experts in literary studies, cultural history, computer science and geographical information science from the universities of Lancaster and Birmingham. The three-year project started in October 2015.