How Distant is Close Enough? Exploring the Toponymic Distortions of Life Story Geographies

Abstract

Stories are now broadly recognized as important sources of geographic information in different domains of the spatial humanities. The methodologies mobilized to identify these spatial data, however, remain the subject of intense debate. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by focusing on what we can learn from the close reading of stories to improve the quality of distant reading approaches. We do this through an in-depth comparative analysis of how toponyms are used across 10 oral life stories of exiles. Results show that a "distant listening" of the number of country names mentioned in these stories provides an accurate representation of their global geographies. However, the finer-scaled geographies of these stories become highly distorted when counting more local toponyms such as neighbourhoods, cities or regions. This study also reveals that results could be improved by accounting for the distribution and repetition of toponyms throughout these stories. Such insights and their nuances are described in this paper with an aim to help narrow the gap between close and distant reading methodologies.