The distribution of US city-level locations, revealing a preponderance of literary–geographic occurrences in what we would now call the Northeast corridor between Washington, DC, and Boston, but also sizable numbers throughout the South, Midwest, Texas, and California.

Matthew Wilkens, Assistant Professor of English at Notre Dame University, will be speaking at the Digital Humanities Forum on March 7 about Geospatial Cultural Analysis and its intersection with Literary Production. Specifically, Wilkens’ research asks: Using computational analysis, how can we define and assess the geographic imagination of American fiction around the Civil War, and how did the geographic investments of American literature change across that sociopolitical event?

We spoke to him about his choice to use a quantitative methodology, the challenges that were consequently faced, and the overall future for the Digital Humanities. This is what he had to say:

What brought you to Digital Humanities methodologies?

I guess it was…