Exploring Qualitative Geographies in Large Volumes of Digital Text: Placing Tourists, Travelers, and Inhabitants in the English Lake District

A novel approach to analyzing geographies in digital texts, focusing on the English Lake District pre-1900, reveals distinct spatial narratives for tourists, travelers, and inhabitants. Unlike traditional methods relying solely on toponyms (place names), this study introduces 'geo-nouns' to link places with geographical features and employs adjectives, nouns, and verbs to capture 'sense of place.' This methodology enables holistic and textual definitions of locations, moving beyond Euclidean space to uncover nuanced spatial relationships in large volumes of text. The findings highlight how different groups perceive and describe the Lake District, offering new insights into qualitative geographies.

Gregory, I. N., Smail, R., Taylor, J. E., & Butler, J. O. (2024). Exploring Qualitative Geographies in Large Volumes of Digital Text: Placing Tourists, Travelers, and Inhabitants in the English Lake District. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 114(9), 1985–2009. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2024.2369593