www.litlong.org MAKING MONUMENTS

This resource focuses on Edinburgh’s monuments, asking you to explore and play with excerpts of writing that you fi nd in LitLong. LitLong includes writing from some of Scotland’s most notable writers, including Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott. The Scott monument is very di cult to miss on Princes Street in the centre of Edinburgh and nearby you will fi nd a statue of Robert Louis Stevenson in Princes St gardens.

Use the internet to fi nd and explore one or more of Edinburgh’s monuments. Search LitLong for excerpts around your chosen monument(s). Use the LitLong fi lters to search for excerpts published around the time your monument was built or excerpts that relate to your monument in other ways.

Create a path around or between your monument(s). Select ‘Make a Path’ for the fi rst excerpt, then ‘Add excerpt to Path’. Select ‘Finish path’ (Filter menu) to complete your path.

Which excerpts do you like and why? What is interesting or surprising about the monuments you like (or dislike)? Walk the path you’ve created taking photos and/or notes (what you see, hear, smell) along the way. Conduct some research on your chosen monuments . Piece together a poem from your research, any excerpts you like and your journey there are white to your chosen monument. versions of these icons here too

Monument How many statues of women are there in Edinburgh? Men Why do you think there are so few? Who looks after our monuments today? Who do you think is most deserving of a statue or monument today?

Page 1. there are white versions of these icons here too 1 Design Think about who is your favourite author and what you like about their writing. George Meikle’s design of the Scott monument incorporated 64 statues of the characters Sir Walter Scott wrote about. Think about the characters created by your author.

Design your own monument incorporating one or more of your favourite characters.

Create a poem1650’s incorporating1650’s text from the excerpts you’ve found in LitLong and 1850’s 1850’s 2 Poetry 1750’s 1750’s information from your research. Here, odd lines are from LitLong excerpts of Scott’s writing while even numbered lines refer to information about the Scott monument.

A scene of grandeur and beauty perhaps unequalled Victorian Gothic He seemed so much fatigued with the motion 288 steps ascertain its truth £16,154 It haunts me from morning to night 1840-1844 You have not time to play Lines taken from: The Journal of Walter Scott The Heart of Midlothian Redgauntlet The Journal of Walter Scott

About LitLong is a unique map of literary Edinburgh. Behind it sits a database of 50,000 Litlong excerpts from around 550 books (novels, short stories, letters, memoirs). Excerpts feature the use of an Edinburgh place name, allowing each to be given a set of coordinates and pinned to the map. The database was created using state of the art text-mining tools by a project team involving researchers in both English Literature and Informatics at The University of Edinburgh.

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