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Ian Gregory

Distinguished Professor of Digital Humanities

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BA: Geography (Lancaster); MSc: Geographical Information Systems (Edinburgh); PhD: Historical GIS (London)

Department of History
Lancaster University
Lancaster, LA1 4YT, UK

Room: B144, Bowland
E-mail: I.Gregory@lancaster.ac.uk

I work in Digital Humanities and am particularly interested in using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) with texts as well as the more traditional quantitative sources. I have used these approaches to study a range of topics from historical demography to Lake District literature. This research has been the subject of a number of major projects including the European Research Council funded Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places, the Leverhulme Trust funded Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities and, most recently, the ESRC/NSF Funded Space Time Narratives project. More details are on my official website.

I am currently the Associate Dean of Research in Lancaster's Faculty for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Before that I was Head of the Department of History for the period 2018-22. I co-founded and co-direct which draws together methodological expertise in fields such as spatial humanities, corpus linguistics, natural language processing and artificial intelligence, and applies them accross humanities disciplines.

Research interests:

1. The use of conventional Historical GIS techniques to study long-term change in Britain and Ireland in particular through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

2. Using GIS to explore textual sources, especially large corpora, through the combined use of geo-parsing, spatial analysis and corpus linguistics techniques.

3. Developing an understanding of what GIS has to offer to the humanities and developing the use of these technologies in disciplines including history and literary studies.

4. Using digital technologies across the humanities and social sciences to gain a better understanding of the past.

Grant funding:

I have been awarded around 25 grants, 14 of them as PI, including projects from the European Research Council, Arts & Humanities Research Council, Economic & Social Research Council and Leverhulme Trust. These have mainly been concerned with using geographical technologies to better understand the geographies of our history and culture. Recent funded projects include:

  • (ESRC/NSF funded)
  • (AHRC funded)
  • Envisaging Landscapes and Naming Places: the Lake District before the map (British Academy funded)
  • Space and narrative in the Digital Humanities: A research network (AHRC funded)
  • (ERC funded)
  • (the Leverhulme Trust)
  • Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: A large-scale computational analysis of 16th century historical sources (ESRC, Trans-Atlantic Platform funded)
  • Creating a Chronotopic Ground for the Mapping of Literary Texts: Innovative Data Visualisation and Spatial Interpretation in the Digital Medium (AHRC funded)
  • (ESRC funded)
  • Newspapers, poverty and long-term change. A corpus analysis of five centuries of texts (Newby Trust funded)
  • (Heritage Lottery Fund)
  • (COST)
  • (funded by the AHRC/ESRC's Religion & Society programme)
  • (British Academy funded)
  • Spatial Humanities Conference:

    I organised the first Spatial Humanties Conference at Lancaster in 2016. Since then we have held it biennially in 2018 (Lancaster), 2021 (Lisbon, hosted remotely due to the pandemic), and and . We will announce the venue for the 2026 conference soon.

    Recent publications:

    Books:

    Journal articles:

    Book chapters:

    Conference proceedings and other publications:

    Journal editions:

    Media interest:

    Keynote and plenary presentations:

    • Mapping 'Post-Conflict' Cities', Berlin, (20/10/22)
    • CounterVoices: Spatial modernities conference, York 13/5/21 (presented remotely)
    • Space and Time Conference 2019, Pisa, Italy (26/6/19)
    • What's on the map? CLARIAH-Benelux Workshop on Geospatial and Semantic Web Technologies, Ghent, Belgium (11/6/19)
    • Nineteenth Century Matters, Lancaster (29/5/19)
    • Mapping Historical Landscapes in Transformation (with Drs C. Donaldson and J. Taylor), Leuven, Belgium (24/11/17)
    • Clarin 2016, Aix-en-Provence, France (26/10/16) “Texts, language and geography: Understanding literature using geographical text analysis”
    • British Association for Victorian Studies, BAVS talk, University of Sussex, UK (16/5/16) “Digital Approaches to Understanding Lake District literature”
    • Digital Humanities, Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk, Russia (22/9/15) “Spatial Humanities: Using digital technologies to understand the geographies within texts”
    • DF McKenzie Bi-Annual Lecture, Australasian Summer School, Victoria University Wellington/Alexander Turnbull National Library of New Zealand (28/1/15) “Mapping texts: Using GIS to understand the geographies in large textual collections.”
    • Practical Applications of Language Corpora, Lodz, Poland (21/11/14) “Mapping corpora: Approaches to understanding the geographies in texts.”
    • Launch event for the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership, Manchester, UK (1/10/14) “New Challenges in the Arts and Humanities.”
    • Interdisciplinary Summer School in Digital Methods, Lancaster, UK (17/7/14) “Using corpus data in Geographical Information Systems”
    • Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (31/7/13) “Towards Spatial Humanities: Using GIS to map and analyse the geographies within texts.”
    • Interdisciplinary Summer School in Digital Methods, Lancaster, UK (16/7/13) “Bringing together corpus linguistics and GIS: Understanding the geographies in texts”
    • HiCor 2013, Oxford, UK (28/2/13) “From Texts to Mapping: Understanding the geographies in historical corpora.”
    • ACUMEN (Assembly for Comparative Urbanisation and the Material Environment), Leeds, UK (12/12/13) “Using Textual Sources within a GIS to Explore Urban (and Other) Trends.”
    • LENS “Mapping People” Symposium, Redlands, California (31/10/12) “GIS and Texts: New approaches to understanding the geographies of the past.”
    • Spatial Narratives and Deep Maps: Explorations in Advanced Geo-spatial Technologies and the Spatial Humanities, Indianapolis, Indiana (19/6/12) “Deep maps, spatial narratives, and quantitative and qualitative scholarship in the humanities”
    • Eurel Conference, Manchester, UK (26/10/12) “Long-term religious change and stability in Ireland: A geographical analysis.”
    • Text Encoding Initiative Members Meeting, Zadar, Croatia (13/11/10) “Censuses, literature and newspapers: Integrating sources and scholarship using GIS.”
    • Summer School Lecture at Digital Humanities Observatory Summer School, Dublin, Ireland (1/7/10) “Space: A neglected frontier. Geographical Information Systems and text.”
    • GIS in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan (9/10/09) “Censuses, literature and newspapers: quantitative and qualitative approaches to studying the past with GIS.”
    • 4th Annual Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Conference and 1st European Conference for Collaborative Humanities Research (8/10/08) “Time-enabled GIS as a Humanities research infrastructure for Europe.”