FAQ
GEES subjects and literature both write about places and spaces. Both make places meaningful in a social medium.
Texts can aid you immensely - developing your world view, helping you to frame concepts in the worlds around you, assisting you to share in the experience of other realities, telling you truths beyond the more prosaic ones you encounter each day.
Q. Do any academics in GEES study texts as data?
They do! The growing field of literary geographies addresses the ways geography is written. Academic analysis of other modes of writing make geographers more aware of the limitations and effects of their own, and promotes experimentation with alternatives styles of writing geography. Lots of academics in other fields read literary texts for pleasure, but they nonetheless inspire their research and their own teaching and writing.
Q. Why do texts make good ‘data’?
Texts – novels, short stories, other works of creative fiction provide an alternative, richer ‘truth’ or version of representation, about the nature of place, and landscape, and society, and so on, not available from more conventional geographical data sources. Artists, of all kinds, including writers such as novelists and poets, possess polished skills of evocation and an aesthetic sensibility that allows them to develop insights and convey those to the reader.
Q. How can we use texts alongside observations, measurements, demographic figures, interviews, archival material etc.?
Text is not just another data source on social or cultural phenomenon. Texts can disrupt or challenge conventional meanings because they do not bear a responsibility for truthful, replicable representation. Instead, texts are provocative, able to challenge and produce new insights, not just confirm the already known.
Not as mirrors of society. Just as people shape texts, they are also shaped by texts. Texts inform and create societies and their conventions.
Not as ‘weak’ data because they are subjective. Texts’ subjectivity is their strength. They are not just the emotional counterpart to an objective geography, rather, they encompass many of the world’s complexities, a range of landscapes of experiences, motivations, emotions, and knowledges.
Not just as pretty stories or vivid descriptions. They narrate the world, offering a perception, which is one reality of many realities, but can become a dominant reality, can be moulded into other people’s realities. Text can contain what are called meta-narratives, powerful accounts of life that come to explain whole belief systems and histories to us.
Instead, as a product in the circuit of culture, texts do not exist in a vacuum. What’s in a text intersects with academic research but also with journalism, blogging, music, dance, the visual arts, politics, social movements etc.
Not as mirrors of society. Just as people shape texts, they are also shaped by texts. Texts inform and create societies and their conventions.
Not as ‘weak’ data because they are subjective. Texts’ subjectivity is their strength. They are not just the emotional counterpart to an objective geography, rather, they encompass many of the world’s complexities, a range of landscapes of experiences, motivations, emotions, and knowledges.
Not just as pretty stories or vivid descriptions. They narrate the world, offering a perception, which is one reality of many realities, but can become a dominant reality, can be moulded into other people’s realities. Text can contain what are called meta-narratives, powerful accounts of life that come to explain whole belief systems and histories to us.
Instead, as a product in the circuit of culture, texts do not exist in a vacuum. What’s in a text intersects with academic research but also with journalism, blogging, music, dance, the visual arts, politics, social movements etc.
GEES students need to be able to understand the context from which an author is writing. Building this understanding requires further research and reading on place, space and culture, as well as watching video grabs or films, listening to podcasts, reading blogs etc. – possibly even fieldwork!
Students need to be able to analyse the text. They should be able to bring together their reading of the text with their other research to examine how the images produced in texts create certain forms of consciousness – class, national, environmental, gendered consciousness, etc. Then they can explain the process of cultural creation and change of which writing is a part.
Analysis of text is a matter of practice, but there are some useful tools to apply.
Metaphor
A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.
Simile
A figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid.
Irony
The expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.
Sardony
Scornfully or cynically mocking.
Allegory
A story, poem, or picture which can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.
Trope
A figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression.
Image
Visually descriptive or figurative language.
Landscape-as-character
A character who influences the protagonist by limiting or enhances action. It can even 'speak' with the hero, letting him or her know what is possible or desirable: whether there is a hiding place or not, whether food and shelter is or is not available, comfort or misery.