Analyzing Border Crossings in Contemporary Irish Literature with Literary Mapping

Our project analyzes works by Belfast writers Anne Devlin and Lucy Caldwell to develop a spatio-temporal analysis of the ways in which women are depicted as crossing borders in public space, particularly during the Troubles. We used GIS, and specifically the open-source geodata and software QGIS and OpenStreetMaps. To visualize the external or implied aspects of the locations identified in the works, we embedded socio-historical information, such as census data. We used OCR and XML to pull information from the texts, though copyright prohibited us from making these texts publicly available. Once we have compiled our data, one way in which we plan to consider it is through the lens of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space.