Ian N. Gregory

Spatial narratives help us to organize experiences and give them meaning. Previous approaches to understanding geographies in textual sources focus on geoparsing to automatically identify place names and allocate them to coordinates. Those are highly quantitative, and are limited to named places with coordinates, and have little concept of time. Narratives of journeys indicate that human experiences of geography are often subjective and more suited to qualitative representation. Geography is not limited to named places but incorporates the vague, imprecise, and ambiguous, e.g "the camp", or "the hills in the distance", and relative locations such as "near to", "on the left", "north of" or "a few hours' journey from". Places are organized worlds of meaning, characterized by experience, emotion, and memory as well as by geography. In this paper, we discuss our approach to gaining more insight from textual data beyond the toponyms and introduce an extensible framework for extracting, analyzing, and visualizing spatial elements that define the 'locale' as well as the 'sense of place' referenced in text using two test corpora --the Corpus of the Lake District Writing and Holocaust Survivors' Testimonies.

The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime - July 2023

This chapter reports on research resulting from academics from linguistics, history and geography working together in order to cast light upon the geography of prostitution in seventeenth-century Britain. We will demonstrate the usefulness and untapped potential of combining corpus linguistics and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) as an approach to researching historical texts. Corpus linguists are beginning to pursue new methodological advances which encourage them to “think geographically” and provide opportunities to enrich their understanding of a body of texts by uncovering spatial patterns in types of discourse (Gregory & Hardie 2011: 298-299, 309). The ability to move from corpus text to a visual mapping of geographical data and then back into the corpus text provides rich opportunities for humanities scholars in general, and corpus linguists in particular.

Techniques for extracting place names (toponyms) from texts and using them to conduct analyses of the geographies within the texts are becoming reasonably well established. These are generally referred to as Geographical Text Analysis (GTA) and allow us to ask questions about the geographies within a corpus. The limitation of this approach is that the geographies that can be uncovered are solely associated with toponyms for which a coordinate-based location can be assigned. While this method is valuable, it is effectively a quantitative representation of the geographies associated with named places. Other representations of geography are ignored. To complement GTA, we need to develop techniques that are capable of representing the more qualitative representations of geography that are found within texts. Drawing on the Corpus of Lake District Writing, this paper presents some initial ideas about how this can be achieved, primarily by using techniques from corpus linguistics.

This chapter analyses geographical trends in relative poverty and inequality in England and Wales between 1898 and the present by assembling statistics for infant mortality, overcrowded housing and unemployment for Joseph Rowntree’s times, the inter-war depression, and the 'never-had-it-so-good' post-War boom. The research of Rowntree and his contemporaries was strictly local in focus, studying poverty in a single town such as York or a single district of the metropolis. The chapter examines the changing geography of housing via census statistics of overcrowding. Overcrowding is usually summarised in terms of persons per room: in the nineteenth century, overcrowding meant rates of over two persons per room, but over one person per room is seen as unacceptable. The pattern for both infant mortality and overcrowding shows a rapid decline in average rates but at the same time inequality seems to rise.

We analyse silence and tranquillity in historical and contemporary corpora to understand ways landscapes were—and are—perceived in the Lake District National Park in England. Through macro and microreading we develop a taxonomy of aural experiences, and explore how changes to categories of silence from our taxonomy—for instance, the overall decline in mentions of absolute silence—provide clues to changes in the landscape and soundscape of the Lake District. Modern authors often contrast silence with anthropogenic sounds, while historical authors adhere to a cultural construction where the Lake District is presented as a tranquil area by ignoring industrial sounds. Using sentiment analysis we show that silence and tranquil sounds in our corpora are, as a whole, more positively associated than random text from the corpora, with this difference being especially marked in contemporary descriptions. Focusing closely on individual texts allows us to illustrate how this increased positivity can be related to the emergence of silence and tranquillity as valuable components of landscape. Mapping our corpora confirmed the influence of Wordsworth’s writing on descriptions of silence; and revealed the co-location of pockets of tranquillity near to transport arteries in contemporary descriptions.