Nation, Ethnicity, and the Geography of British Fiction, 1880-1940

Abstract

Among the most pressing problems in modernist literary studies are those related to Britain's engagement with the wider world under empire and to its own rapidly evolving urban spaces in the years before the Second World War. In both cases, the literary-geographic imagination—or unconscious—of the period between 1880 and 1940 can help to shed light on how texts by British and British-aligned writers of the era understood these issues and how they evolved over time. At the highest level, how can we characterize the international and domestic geographies of British writing? What roles, if any, did cultural identity play in contemporary writers' spatial imagination? What locations were over- or under-represented in their work and how, if at all, does the answer change when we group writers by national origin or by perceived ethnicity? What shifts in geographic attention marked the transition from the late Victorian period to the interwar era of high modernism? These questions, and others like them, have received much recent attention, both popular and academic. In this essay, we explore what we learn when we ask them at scale with computational assistance.

Giving shape to large digital libraries through exploratory data analysis

“…The Research Center supports a number of venues for scholarship over the HathiTrust Digital Library, including the public release of the Extracted Features dataset on which HT+BW is built (Jett et al, 2020). The HathiTrust corpus has seen especially strong scholarly adoption by those interested in cultural analytics and digital humanists (e.g., Underwood 2019, Manovich 2018Evans and Wilkens 2018;McConnaughey et al 2017), but the breadth of languages and subjects combined with the depth of the collection makes it very broadly useful.…”

“…The rapid recent development of scanned text digital libraries provides the material for new scales of historic and humanistic inquiry into the published word. However, while the size of collections such as the HathiTrust Digital Library, Google Books, and Internet Archive allows for more comprehensive, aggregate-level insights of culture and language across eras (e.g., Michel et al 2011, Aiden and Michel 2014, McConnaughey et al 2017, Manovich 2018Evans and Wilkens 2018), the burdens of scale also limit the flexibility and approachability of those insights. This paper argues for flexible and easy-to-use exploratory tools to understand massive text collections, in order to support new forms of corpus-based scholarship.…”

A Computational Approach to Urban Space in Science Fiction

“…The geographic locations contained in both corpora are easily accessed thanks to the Textual Geographies project, which makes available the geographic data related to the HathiTrust digital library. 13,29 For the purposes of this study, I define urban locations as those associated with a third-level administrative area or lower (including all localities). 30 The first feature to analyze is the number of occurrences of urban locations per 100,000 words in a novel.…”

Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4

“…Research in cultural analytics at the intersection of NLP and narrative is often focused on developing algorithmic devices to measure some phenomenon of interest in literary texts (Piper et al, 2021;Yoder et al, 2021;Coll Ardanuy et al, 2020;Evans and Wilkens, 2018). The rise of large-pretrained language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 has the potential to radically transform this space by both reducing the need for large-scale training data for new tasks and lowering the technical barrier to entry (Underwood, 2023).…”