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…