Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District: A Geographical Text Analysis by Joanna E. Taylor and Ian N. Gregory (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District: A Geographical Text Analysis by Joanna E. Taylor and Ian N. Gregory Adam Sills Joanna E. Taylor and Ian N. Gregory, Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District: A Geographical Text Analysis ( Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2022). Pp. 290; 45 b/w and 62 color illus., 7 tables. $130.00 cloth, $49.95 paper. Reconciling traditional methods of close reading and analysis with those of the digital humanities and what Franco Moretti has termed "distant reading" is a fraught business to be sure, especially given the stakes for the future of English literary studies and the humanities in general. However, rather than argue for the merits of one approach over the other or highlight the respective tensions between them, Joanna Taylor and Ian Gregory instead attempt to forge a novel methodology in their compelling and engaging study, Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District: A Geographical Text Analysis, one that employs both close and distant reading, textual and digital analysis, in order to provide different, albeit complimentary, perspectives on Lake District writing from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Taylor and Gregory refer to this methodology as "multiscalar analysis," as it offers readers a means of moving back and forth between "macro- and micro-approaches," enabling them to engage with "both scales for the development of nuanced literary analysis" (5). Multiscalar analysis, as they argue, "defamiliarizes" the literary text by transforming it into something entirely new, a graph, a map, a chart, or other forms of digital representation, that require both computational analyses as well as more traditional methods of close reading in order to make sense of that data. It is an inherently interdisciplinary approach that serves to "productively destabilize our assumptions about a literary text, period, or genre" (6) and, in the process, forces us to ask new questions that challenge conventional ways of reading and established literary canons, thus broadening and diversifying the potential range of texts to be considered within the discipline of English literary studies. To that end, Taylor and Gregory have assembled a substantial body of writings about England's Lake District from 1622 to 1900, including, most notably, the works of the so-called Lake Poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, as well as those by Thomas De Quincy, John Ruskin, Robert Anderson, and Beatrix Potter, among others. The "Corpus of Lake District Writing" (CLDW) they construct also contains a wide variety of guidebooks, chorographies, travel narratives, and journals that provided the would-be tourist information about and broader access to the geography of the Lake District, highlighting its most significant and perhaps meaningful places to visit and offering a sense of what one might expect in terms of its affective and aesthetic impact on the visitor. In total, the CLDW comprises only eighty texts, but as Taylor and Gregory contend, their more selective "multi-scalar" approach enables them to engage with a close [End Page 144] reading of those texts in ways that "big data" does not always allow. Nor do they ever claim that their data set is comprehensive or that their subsequent findings are definitive, only that it is a suggestive "starting point" for further analysis and interpretation. By combining corpus linguistics, Geographical Information Science (GISc), and traditional literary studies, Taylor and Gregory are then able to "construct a detailed account of what is happening in the corpus" and "chart changes across time and genre, analyzing these alterations as part of the complex literary and cultural milieu that the corpus represents" (10). The resulting maps, charts, and graphs they produce in each chapter are, in this sense, also limited, not only because the underlying corpus is finite by design but also because, as they freely admit, quantitative analysis can only go so far in conveying the thoughts, feelings, and associations conjured by a particular geography, the subjective and profoundly human experience of place itself. Digital technologies, including GISc, cannot, in their words, "frame the research questions that justify producing the map," nor can they "interpret the patterns revealed in such visualizations" (28), hence the need for "deep mapping" to account for both the objective data produced by the use of such...