ABSTRACT
How does literary geography change as it becomes digital? In the new spatial humanities, the turn towards digital methods offers both greater scale and precision, creating opportunities to study new kinds of critical objects. A concept such as Matthew Wilkens’s ‘geographic investment’ (the number of words in a text naming particular places) is made possible by our ability to algorithmically identify and count place-names within a large literary corpus (Wilkens 804). Such a concept is radically new to literary studies and, we argue, important for understanding the complex relationship between fiction and its represented geography, as it allows macroscopic literary-geographic patterns to emerge. However, although the identification of text’s geographic investment requires an algorithmic approach, such an approach is unable to parse the meaning of the patterns it identifies. Without knowledge of the ways places were invoked in fiction, maps of general geographic investment are, to a certain degree, intractable to interpretation.
