‘Lit Long’, a searchable interactive map of the city, will take users to locations made famous by Scottish writers from Walter Scott to Irvine Welsh – and tell you what they wrote

From Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark’s maverick schoolteacher, to Edward Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson’s alter ego villain, Edinburgh has long provided a backdrop for some of literature’s most enigmatic characters. Now a digital initiative is offering you the chance to explore the city’s streets through the eyes of the authors they inspired.

Launching on Monday, Lit Long: Edinburgh has an online interactive map that pinpoints the locations referred to in narrative extracts. “We wanted to find a way to look at the sedimented literary history of Edinburgh in a new way,” says Professor James Loxley of Edinburgh University, who led the work. By applying filters to the map, it is possible to narrow the extracts – depicted, appropriately enough, with a quill – to works based on keywords, titles or authors.

“Grassmarket, for example, is linked to a host of extracts including a grim description of the gallows from Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian: ‘This ill-omened apparition was of great height, with a scaffold surrounding it, and a double ladder placed against it, for the ascent of the unhappy criminal and executioner’.”

And it doesn’t end there. Loxley and his team say they are developing the interactive element to add a “sentiment visualiser” tool that employs algorithms to analyse the language of the extracts and reveal whether locations are portrayed as upbeat areas or cheerless haunts. “It gives you a pie-chart breakdown and a score so you can start to get this very powerful visual sense of whether a place has been described very positively or very negatively,” says Dr Tara Thomson, a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh who has been working on the project.

A spot of literary time travel can also offer insight into a district’s changing fortunes. “You can see how Walter Scott described a place that Robert Louis Stevenson described years later, perhaps in a different way,” she says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A search on the Lit Long:Edinburgh map Photograph: Lit Long

Lit Long: Edinburgh will also have a searchable database, as well as a mobile app that is scheduled to be released next month. This will alert users to relevant literary extracts as they wander through the city.

The project, with references to more than 47,000 passages from 550 works, is the work of the Palimpsest project – a 15-month programme by the universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews, and the Edina data centre. It has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with the goal of fusing maps and texts to create an innovative digital experience.

Bringing together researchers across literary and technological fields, the team developed a set of text-mining algorithms to plumb the depths of collections including Project Gutenberg and the National Library of Scotland, in a search for fiction, travel memoirs and personal correspondence that refer Scotland’s capital.

While Lit Long: Edinburgh will feature numerous extracts from 19th and early 20th century works, a selection of contemporary narratives have also been included. Among them are the novels of Alexander McCall Smith, for whom the city provided the backdrop for the adventures of his philosopher-cum-sleuth Isabel Dalhousie, as well as works by Irvine Welsh, Muriel Spark, Alice Thompson and Edinburgh’s former poet laureate – or makar – Ron Butlin. “Edinburgh is the most inspiring city to live in and to write about,” says Butlin, who is enthusiastic about linking imaginative worlds to physical reality. “[The project], I think, has really put its finger on making this magical interaction happen and making it possible for everybody to experience this.”

Thompson, whose novel The Existential Detective is set in the seaside suburb of Portobello, also believes the interactives will offer readers a new perspective on the city. “I think place is so central to a lot of interesting writing,” she explains.

Butlin himself will be reading at the project’s launch event at the university on Monday, joining other featured authors including Doug Johnstone, Regi Claire and the winner of the project’s writing competition. Demonstrations of the interactive website, litlong.org, and the app will also be on offer.

“It is all just dead stones or names out of the past and then suddenly it will become actual and real and present-day,” enthuses Butlin of the digital experience. “So that will be one huge contemporary moment, if you like – it’s really exciting.”

By sharing the digital tools that the team have developed, Thomson is also hopeful that similar interactives will be rolled out to other cities. “All of this is going to be open-access and available through our website, so in theory anyone who would like to reproduce the project in another location would be able then to apply those tools,” she says. Loxley agrees: “Lit Long: London would be fantastic!”

• This article was amended on Sunday 29 March to correct the spelling of Thomson in the final paragraph.