Shakespeare’s World – I thought this would be simple but …

Last week I had a call with Professor Gavin Hollis who is writing about Shakespeare’s use of maps and coining the term mapp’ry – you can read a bit more about our conversation here. That conversation prompted me to think about Shakespeare’s references to places in his plays and what that might tell me about his understanding of the world at the end of the 16th century. I thought this would be quite simple but of course the devil is in the detail!I started by downloading the Project Gutenberg complete works text file and then with a lot of help from Claude used spaCy NER (Named Entity Recognition) to extract candidate place names — produced 578 candidates requiring manual review, I manually reviewed and approved 288 places, added countries and then geocoded them using the OpenCage API and finally made manual coordinate fixes for ancient/mythological places (Ilium, Barbary, Corioles, Belmont).Once I had a list of places referred to in Shakespeare’s plays I needed to extract the quotes with play names and act/scene references. This was challenging to say the least, some place names are also character names (particularly in the English historical plays), I needed to ignore dramatise personae sections and also distinguish scene settings from quotes. I ended up with 2,685 quotes and 153 scene settings across 288 places and 38 plays.Having built a number of maps with MapLibre and Claude’s help I thought the map build would be easy but I had the neat idea to use a quill symbol as a map marker – hours of wasted effort! I don’t really understand why this would not work, when I decided to scrap the quill and use a standard circle symbol it just worked straight away. Later on I changed to a teardrop symbol with no problem. The rest of the map build was relatively straight forward although striving for very good (forget perfection) burnt some time. For this map I wanted a Shakespearian feel so I used Stamen’s Watercolour tiles via Stadia Maps, I think they look really nice, I added a black and white option as well.As I tested, I kept discovering glitches in the data which I had to work through with a combination of python scripts, courtesy of Claude, and manual edits which were easier than solving edge cases in a script.

The funniest of errors was Maidenhead – spaCy identified it as a place with 14 references but when I looked at the quotes they were all Shakespeare referring to virginity rather than a place!I am getting better at this stuff but this map was much tougher than I had expected, mainly because of the data. I am pleased with the end result and I think it works pretty well. I particularly like the feature to search for a place or a play, if you select a play the map filters just the places mentioned in that play and zooms to its extents, you can then explore a sample of the quotes mentioning a place. I am sure you will find some humorous mistakes in place and quote extraction, send them to me and I will try to fix. The Grateful Dead gig map, completey rewritten, accurate venue locations, no gigs or setlists missing, stats properly calculated. I am proud of this one All of the Geomob events from the start in 2010 to 2025, with speakers and talk titles. You can view an animated timeline to see the growth of hte Geomob community. What is the national animal of India or the national symbol of Saudi Araboa or the favourite dish of South Korea? Explore the national symbols, animals, birds, poets, dishes, mottos of the world. What is the origin of each of 3,000 species in Britain and how has the coverage changed in the last 100 years? Almost 3000 coverage maps!