Navigation auf uzh.ch
Navigation auf uzh.ch
Ekaterina Egorova had joined the URPP Language and Space in September 2013 and successfully defended her dissertation on April 12, 2018 (link to Zora entry).
How do people talk about navigating in space? What does it tell us about how they conceptualize space? How does that depend on the context of navigation? These are some of the central questions in GIScience, driven not only by the scientific motivation, but also by a practical need to incorporate naive geographic knowledge into GISsystems, which are increasingly finding their way into the everyday life of an average citizen. Many studies have examined the way people perceive space and navigate in urban settings, while spatial thinking in and about natural environments remains largely underinvestigated, mostly as a result of associated difficulties for participant studies. At the same time, more and more people engage into a variety of activities in natural spaces such as mountains and share their experiences in the form of expedition reports and description of routes on multiple online platforms. These increasingly large volumes of data offer new opportunities to study space conceptualization, but also require the development and adaption of appropriate methodological tools.
In my project, I apply methods from cognitive and corpus linguistics in order to explore the potential of spatially-focused corpora to answer questions related to spatial cognition. In particular, I investigate spatial language and concepts in alpine route directions from the Web and the digitized journals of the Alpine Club, providing a first, linguistically underpinned, understanding of space conceptualization in the context of mountaineering. Methodologically, my project proceeds from a qualitative, iterative linguistic analysis of spatial concepts in route directions to a corpus-based investigation of a particular structure (fictive motion) and further to a corpus-driven development of rules for its extraction and classification.
Thus, in case study 1, I report on the variety of ways in which main wayfinding elements -- landmarks and action prescriptions, route segments and decision points -- are represented linguistically, revealing certain thought-related patterns such as deictic switches and switches between the levels of granularity in space description. Case study applies a corpus-driven approach to explore a particular structure – fictive motion (“The ridge went North”) and report on the types of spatial scenes (static and dynamic) that it can encode. Finally, in case study 3, rules are developed for the automatic extraction and classification of fictive motion in text.
The contributions of the project can be explored at multiple levels. From the perspective of methodology, it demonstrates a pipeline for a linguistically grounded, corpus-based investigation of spatial language and concepts. It also represents an important step towards the spatial parsing of text, which will enrich existing toolboxes, allowing the capture of spatial information in a variety of textual data. On a theoretical level, it enhances our understanding of the ways spatial information is represented linguistically in various types of spatial discourses, providing insights into spatial thinking in the context of mountaineering.
Supervisors: Ross S. Purves, Thora Tenbrink, Robert Weibel
Funding source: URPP Language and Space
