Hearing the silence: finding the middle ground in the spatial humanities? Extracting and comparing perceived silence and tranquillity in the English Lake District

Silence and tranquillity in the English Lake District have become more positively associated in contemporary descriptions compared to historical ones, reflecting their growing value as components of landscape perception. This shift is evident through a decline in mentions of absolute silence and an increased contrast with anthropogenic sounds in modern texts. The study employed macro and microreading techniques on historical and contemporary corpora to develop a taxonomy of aural experiences, while sentiment analysis revealed that silence and tranquil sounds are overwhelmingly positive in descriptions, particularly today. Mapping confirmed the enduring influence of Wordsworth’s writing and identified pockets of tranquillity near transport arteries in modern accounts.

Chesnokova, O., Taylor, J. E., Gregory, I. N., & Purves, R. S. (2018). Hearing the silence: finding the middle ground in the spatial humanities? Extracting and comparing perceived silence and tranquillity in the English Lake District. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 33(12), 2430–2454. https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2018.1552789