Description
Matthew Hannah (Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities) Yiqiu Yan (Undergraduate Researcher) Space and place are incredibly important features of the postcolonial novel and, for writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who are living in former colonies, geography plays an incredibly significant role in navigating issues of identity, language, and nationality. Because the land is such a contested concept in postcolonial writing, we believe that attending to the localities described in literary representations of the land will provide a rich resource for theorizing the relationship between people and places, between colonies and nations. “Mapping Postcolonial Literature” will showcase an interactive map of literary spaces and places mentioned and described in twentieth and twenty-first-century English-language novels written in and about former colonies around the world. While our collection will not be complete, we hope to collect a sizable corpus as a test case for future projects. Using Zotero and the Hathi Trust data analysis portal, we will collect a representative corpus of texts from a list of postcolonial novels and perform algorithmic analyses to scrape location data from the corpus using named entity recognition. Then, we will geocode the resulting list of locations and add descriptive content for some of the locations derived from the novels themselves, combining spatial representation with literary description. The resulting dataset will then be visualized using mapping software to generate a map of the geographic locations mentioned in the collection of novels.
Start Date
11-2019
Document Type
Other
Keywords
literary studies; digital humanities; colonialism; postcolonialism
Session List
Poster
Mapping Postcolonial Literature
Matthew Hannah (Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities) Yiqiu Yan (Undergraduate Researcher) Space and place are incredibly important features of the postcolonial novel and, for writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who are living in former colonies, geography plays an incredibly significant role in navigating issues of identity, language, and nationality. Because the land is such a contested concept in postcolonial writing, we believe that attending to the localities described in literary representations of the land will provide a rich resource for theorizing the relationship between people and places, between colonies and nations. “Mapping Postcolonial Literature” will showcase an interactive map of literary spaces and places mentioned and described in twentieth and twenty-first-century English-language novels written in and about former colonies around the world. While our collection will not be complete, we hope to collect a sizable corpus as a test case for future projects. Using Zotero and the Hathi Trust data analysis portal, we will collect a representative corpus of texts from a list of postcolonial novels and perform algorithmic analyses to scrape location data from the corpus using named entity recognition. Then, we will geocode the resulting list of locations and add descriptive content for some of the locations derived from the novels themselves, combining spatial representation with literary description. The resulting dataset will then be visualized using mapping software to generate a map of the geographic locations mentioned in the collection of novels.