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

Abstract

We analyse silence and tranquillity in historical and contemporary corpora to understand ways landscapes were-and are-perceived in the Lake District National Park in England. Through macro and microreading we develop a taxonomy of aural experiences, and explore how changes to categories of silence from our taxonomy-for instance, the overall decline in mentions of absolute silence-provide clues to changes in the landscape and soundscape of the Lake District. Modern authors often contrast silence with anthropogenic sounds, while historical authors adhere to a cultural construction where the Lake District is presented as a tranquil area by ignoring industrial sounds. Using sentiment analysis we show that silence and tranquil sounds in our corpora are, as a whole, more positively associated than random text from the corpora, with this difference being especially marked in contemporary descriptions. Focusing closely on individual texts allows us to illustrate how this increased positivity can be related to the emergence of silence and tranquillity as valuable components of landscape. Mapping our corpora confirmed the influence of Wordsworth's writing on descriptions of silence; and revealed the co-location of pockets of tranquillity near to transport arteries in contemporary descriptions. ARTICLE HISTORY

Best Practice for Forensic Fishing: Combining Text Processing with an Environmental History View of Historic Travel Writing in Loch Lomond, Scotland

“…Although the term tranquil encompasses both acoustic and visual experience, it serves as an indicator that visual experience dominates in touristic landscape descriptions of Loch Lomond. This is in contrast to work on a historic corpus of Lake District writing, where particular soundscapes, as well as quietness and tranquillity appear to have been more central to the experience of the landscape (Chesnokova et al, 2019;Taylor, 2018).…”

Describing and mapping where people experience tranquillity. An exploration based on interviews and Flickr photographs

“…Our map produced from Flickr photographs shows higher concentrations of tranquil photographs than expected in areas around water bodies that are accessible by motorised transport. The absence of motorised transport is thus not a prerequisite for people to experience tranquillity, which was also shown in a study in the Lake District, where user-generated image and descriptions uploaded to the platform Geograph contained references to tranquillity near busy roads (Chesnokova et al, 2018). We found high correspondence between the tranquillity map produced from Flickr content and the tranquillity ratings from respondents in the field-suggesting that this form of user-generated content is a meaningful addition to field-based interviews.…”

Place facets: a systematic literature review

“…However, linguistic facets are yet underexplored. For example, linguistic facets describing tactile, sensual, and auditory experiences of place (e.g., a quiet place) have not been studied sufficiently in comparison to visual experiences (Chesnokova, Taylor, Gregory, & Purves, 2018). Hence, the linguistic facets can be used and extended for developing a schema for extracting platial information from place descriptions.…”