NCRM videos

Joanna Taylor: Geospatial Innovation: Developing Literary GIS

08-11-2018

Joanna Taylor presents at methods@manchester Methods Fair 2018. Abstract: For many humanities scholars, digital approaches continue to seem antithetical to the nuanced close reading of individual texts that characterises the discipline. Literary scholars have expressed particular anxieties about what is lost when digital approaches are applied to textual analysis; they have worried – not without justification – that when we focus on the corpus rather than the individual text, we lose fundamental understandings of how literature works and, perhaps more seriously, how it feels. A danger with using a technology like Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to read the spatial data provided by written texts is that it risks reducing the significance of the individual text in preference for the large corpora, or that it privileges distant reading over close. What this paper will explore, however, is how a geohumanist approach to GIS might be used productively to negotiate a multi-scalar analysis of literary data. It offers an overview of the challenges faced in using GIS for literary study, and explains how the ‘Geospatial Innovation’ project has tried to address some of these issues.