Teaching geography with literary mapping: A didactic experiment

The relationship between maps and literature has long been debated from both narrative and geographical perspectives. At the core of this contribution are so-called reader generated mappings, mapping practices performed after the reading of a literary text. The aim of this article is to suggest possible didactic directions for teaching geography through geo-visualisations based on the reading of literary texts. In particular, this research draws from the results of a literary mapping workshop attended by students during an introductory human geography course at the University of Padua (Italy). Focusing on one of the literary mappings performed by the students, namely the mapping of a short story written by the Italian writer Mario Rigoni Stern, a deductive process is used to understand the possible future potentialities of literary mapping in didactics. Analysing the students\u2019 literary maps, this article aims to direct attention to literary mapping practices as constellations of learning moments to exploit. The reading of the text, the envisioning and creation of the map are here explored as the steps of a complex practice capable of visually developing geographical knowledge

Further frontiers in GIS: Extending Spatial Analysis to Textual Sources in Archaeology

Although the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has a long history in archaeology, spatial technologies have been rarely used to analyse the content of textual collections. A newly developed approach termed Geographic Text Analysis (GTA) is now allowing the semi-automated exploration of large corpora incorporating a combination of Natural Language Processing techniques, Corpus Linguistics, and GIS. In this article we explain the development of GTA, propose possible uses of this methodology in the field of archaeology, and give a summary of the challenges that emerge from this type of analysis.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant “Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, places” (agreement number 283850)

Automatically analysing large texts in a GIS environment: The Registrar General’s reports and cholera in the nineteenth century

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Murrieta-Flores, P., Baron, A., Gregory, I., Hardie, A., & Rayson, P. (2015). Automatically analysing large texts in a GIS environment: The Registrar General’s reports and cholera in the nineteenth century. Transactions in GIS, 19(2), 296-320. DOI: 10.1111/tgis.12106., which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tgis.12106/abstract. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-ArchivingThe aim of this article is to present new research showcasing how Geographic Information Systems in combination with Natural Language Processing and Corpus Linguistics methods can offer innovative venues of research to analyze large textual collections in the Humanities, particularly in historical research. Using as examples parts of the collection of the Registrar General’s Reports that contain more than 200,000 pages of descriptions, census data and vital statistics for the UK, we introduce newly developed automated textual tools and well known spatial analyses used in combination to investigate a case study of the references made to cholera and other diseases in these historical sources, and their relationship to place-names during Victorian times. The integration of such techniques has allowed us to explore, in an automatic way, this historical source containing millions of words, to examine the geographies depicted in it, and to identify textual and geographic patterns in the corpus

Automatically analysing large texts in a GIS environment:the Registrar General’s reports and cholera in the nineteenth century

The aim of this article is to present new research showcasing how Geographic Information Systems in combination with Natural Language Processing and Corpus Linguistics methods can offer innovative venues of research to analyze large textual collections in the Humanities, particularly in historical research. Using as examples parts of the collection of the Registrar General's Reports that contain more than 200,000 pages of descriptions, census data and vital statistics for the UK, we introduce newly developed automated textual tools and well known spatial analyses used in combination to investigate a case study of the references made to cholera and other diseases in these historical sources, and their relationship to place-names during Victorian times. The integration of such techniques has allowed us to explore, in an automatic way, this historical source containing millions of words, to examine the geographies depicted in it, and to identify textual and geographic patterns in the corpus

Digital Approaches to Historical Archaeology:Exploring the Geographies of 16th Century New Spain

The humanities have always been concerned with ideas of space, place and time. However, in the past few years, and with the emergence of Digital Humanities and Computational Archaeology, researchers have started to apply an array of computational methods and geographical analysis tools in order to understand the role that space plays in the historical processes of human societies. As a result, historians and archaeologists, together with computer scientists, are currently developing digital approaches that can be used to address questions and solve problems regarding the geographies contained in documentary sources such as texts and historical maps. Digging into Early Colonial Mexico is an interdisciplinary project that applies a Data Science/Big Data approach to historical archaeology, focusing on the analysis of one of the most important historical sources of the 16th century in Latin America, called the Geographic Reports of New Spain. The purpose of this paper is to: a) describe the nature of the historical corpus, b) introduce the methodologies and preliminary results produced so far by the project, and c) explain some of the theoretical and technical challenges faced throughout the development of the methods and techniques that supported the analysis of the historical corpus

GIS and literary history:advancing digital humanities research through the spatial analysis of historical travel writing and topographical literature

Exploratory studies have demonstrated the benefits of implementing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology in literary and cultural-historical research. These studies have done much to affirm the power and flexibility of GIS technology as a resource for humanities scholarship. At the same time, however, these studies share a common limitation in that they tend to rely on the analysis of point-based cartographic representations. Such representations are suitable for modelling quantitative geographical phenomena, but they are inadequate for modelling qualitative human phenomena. This inadequacy constitutes a significant problem for researchers who aspire to analyse the geographical experiences and spatial relationships represented in works of literature, including works that contain accounts of travel. The present article proposes a solution to this problem by demonstrating how advanced spatial analyses within GIS such as Cost-Surface Analysis (CSA) and Least-Cost-Path Analysis (LCP) can be used to facilitate more nuanced interpretations of historical works of travel writing and topographical literature. Specifically, the article explains how GIS, CSA and LCP can be combined to build coherent spatial models of the journeys recorded in the works of three canonical eighteenth-century British travellers, each of whom composed influential accounts of their travels through the English Lake District: the poet Thomas Gray (1716–1771), the naturalist Thomas Pennant (1726–1798) and the agriculturist Arthur Young (1741–1820)

Traveling the Distances of Karen Tei Yamashita\u27s Fiction: A Review Essay on Yamashita Scholarship and Transnational Studies

This essay provides an analysis of scholarly works on the fiction of Karen Tei Yamashita, contextualizing them within major shifts taking place in a number academic disciplines and fields that are addressing transnationalism

Introduction: Creating new worlds out of old texts

Despite initial expectations that globalization would eradicate the need for geographical space and distance, "maps matter" today in ways that were unimaginable a mere two decades ago. Technological advances have brought to the fore an entirely new set of methods for representing and interacting with spatial formations, while the ever-increasing mobility of ideas, capital, and people has created a world in which urban and regional inequalities are being heightened at an accelerating pace. As a result, the ability of any given place to reap the benefits of global socio-technical flows mainly hinges on the forging of connections that can transcend the limits of its material location. In contrast to the traditional "topographic" perspective, the territorial extent of economic and political realms is being increasingly conceived through a "topological" lens: as a set of overlapping reticulations in which the nature and frequency of links among different sites matter more than the physical distances between them. At the same time, a parallel stream of innovation has revolutionized the understanding of space in disciplines such as history, archaeology, classics, and linguistics. Much of this work has been concentrated in the burgeoning field of the "digital humanities", which has been persistently breaking new ground in the conceptualization of past and present places. When seen in the context of globalization-induced dynamics, such developments emphasize the need for developing cartographic approaches that can bring out the inherently networked structure of social space via a lens that is both theoretically integrative and heuristically sharp. We have decided to respond to these analytical and methodological challenges by focusing on ancient Greek literature: a corpus of work that has often been characterized as being free of the constraints imposed by post-Enlightenment cartography, despite setting the foundations of many contemporary map-making methods. In the 12 chapters that follow, we highlight the rich array of representational devices employed by authors from this era, whose narrative depictions of spatial relations defy the logic of images and surfaces that dominates contemporary cartographic thought. There is a particular focus on Herodotus' Histories - a text that is increasingly taken up by classicists as the example of how ancient perceptions of space may have been rather different to the cartographic view that we tend to assume. But this volume also considers the spatial imaginary through the lens of other authors (e.g. Aristotle), genres (e.g. hymns), cultural contexts (e.g. Babylon), and disciplines (e.g. archaeology), with a view to stimulating a broad-based discussion among readers and critics of Herodotus and ancient Greek literature and culture more generally. In fact, many of the disciplinary and conceptual perspectives explored here are at their inception, and have a more general relevance for the wider community of humanities and social science researchers interested in novel mapping techniques. The resulting juxtaposition of more "traditional", philological discussions of space with chapters dedicated to the exploration of new technologies may jar or appear uneven, especially since we have not set out to privilege one method over another. But it is through viewing these different approaches in the round and reading them alongside each other that, we maintain, we can best disrupt customary ways of thinking (and writing) about space and catch a glimpse of new possibilities

Visualizing a Spatial Archive: GIS, Digital Humanities, and Relational Space

Geography matters! In any reading of literature or history, paper or digital, our imaginations are often invoked through a spatial sense. In a country where the importance of dinnseanchas, or “place lore,” remains a significant contemporary component, a reading of place regularly features across the multiple strands of Irish Studies.[1] From Heaney’s poetry to the novels of Sebastian Barry, place and a sense of place are ever-present in how stories and literary ideas are presented, received, and interpreted.[2] History too, in its archives and methods of study, has always happened somewhere and in that sense has always been explicitly emplaced. Given the broad theme of this issue—querying whether Digital Humanities offers better ways of realizing traditional Humanities goals or has the capacity to change understandings of Humanities goals altogether—it is useful to consider this question empirically against the increase in new digital forms of spatial information.