Geographical Text Analysis
Digital Cartographies of Lake District Literature
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20054603 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ian Gregory (0000-0001-8745-2242), Christopher Donaldson (0000-0002-2924-3001) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Pages | 85-105 |
| Publication date | 2016-05-20 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Literary Mapping in the Digital Age (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.4324/9781315592596-14 |
| OpenAlex | W2245459201 |
| ISBN | 9781315592596 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
Underpinning these endeavours is a conviction in the value not only of geographical thinking, but also – more specifically – of maps as ‘analytical tools’ for displaying information derived from literary works in ways that ‘bring to light relations that would otherwise remain hidden’ (Moretti, Atlas 3). Maps, in so many words, are valuable because they can serve the literary scholar both as instruments for generating abstract representations of particular aspects of specific works and, furthermore, as a means of compilinginformation from multiple works and of collectively assessing and comparing them. This latter process of aggregate analysis, which has variously been called ‘distant reading’ (Moretti, ‘Conjectures’) and ‘macroanalysis’ (Jockers), represents a major advance for the discipline of literary studies, since, as Jockers explains, it enables literary scholars to make substantial use of the ‘massive digital-text collections’ now available to them and, in the process, to launch the discipline fully into the digital age:Today, in the age of digital libraries and large-scale book-digitization projects, the nature of the evidence available to us has changed, radically. Which is not to say that we should no longer read [individual] books . . . but rather to emphasize that massive digital corpora offer us unprecedented access to the literary record and invite, even demand, a new type of evidence gathering and meaning making. (Jockers 7-8)Put simply, instead of engaging with only a handful of outstanding or exemplary works, literary scholars should create new knowledge about those works by studying them in relation to the larger corpora – whether construed historically (in terms of period), formally (in terms of genre, type or mode), tropologically (in terms of specific themes and motifs) or otherwise – into which they can be assembled. Geographical text analysis, the methodology introduced in the following pages, aims to facilitate just this sort of approach by augmenting the traditional methods of textual analysis employed in literary studies with techniques from geography and corpus linguistics (see Gregory et al.)
Geography · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeology and Natural History · Philippine History and Culture
| Unique citing works | 7 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.7 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2024 (9) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 7 |