‘Spatializing’ Travel Narratives in the Belgrade Forest Project: Grounded Methods and Reflexive Strategies for Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Abstract

The Belgrade Forest Project explores the history of a 5,550-ha forest in the northern suburbs of European Istanbul. The first stage of the project involved creating a reproducible strategy for extracting place names and their geographic locations from 100+ travel narratives that reference the forest area. In this article, we share the initial outcomes of a collaboration between researchers in forestry, geography, and linguistics, as well as a documented methodology, coding protocol, and an open, reusable, and interoperable research dataset of tagged place names. We describe a grounded, pragmatic, reflexive, iterative and communicative approach for interdisciplinary research in spatial humanities. Future project stages will enhance the narrative collection with data from other archival materials, such as maps and historical photographs. Outputs will include a multilingual, geolocated data collection of historical landscape features, places, and agents. The results of the project will enhance our understanding of the forest’s historic and ongoing significance to the region.

Keywords:

• interdisciplinary research
• interdisciplinary RDM
• spatial humanities
• geospatial data
• historical maps
• toponyms
• place names
• landscape studies
• corpus linguistics
• grounded theory
• qualitative data analysis
• qualitative coding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Collectively, our areas of research cover forestry, landscape architecture, political and economic geography, digital humanities, physical geography, environmental history, quantitative geospatial analysis, literary studies, and cognitive and corpus linguistics.

2 See for example the volume edited by Çolak (2013).

3 “Proper,” in Coates (2016) “is best understood as mode of reference contrasting with semantic reference; in the former, the intension/sense of any lexical items within the referring expression, and any entailments they give rise to, are canceled” (Coates 2016). In that sense, properhood “does not inherently reside in certain forms, but in the [naming] use to which forms are put in a communication context” (Coates 2016, cited in Motschenbacher 2020, 93).

4 Researchers in landscape studies and geography have noted that traditional place-name research in linguistics has often neglected “the actual referential subject matter” (Mark et al. 2011, 4). Conversely, given the volume of place-name research that has been produced by geographic and landscape-related disciplines, it’s surprising how little discussion is dedicated to the linguistic character of place names, which suggests an implicit but widespread assumption that place names are straightforward to define and easy to identify.

5 Denotation can be described as the aspect of a word’s meaning that allows for it to be used in making statements about the world. Denotation includes the properties that characterize all things that can be labeled with that word, as well as the set of all things that may under that label. (Cruse 2006, 45).

6 Over the centuries, Istanbul’s urban image has been an object of representation by Western visitors, mostly in imagery, maps, and written form. Despite the orientalist gaze they reflect, they contribute rich descriptions of the region’s imperial history and nature-scapes from the 17th to the early 20th century, obtained through direct, on-site observation (Kafescioğlu 2023).

7 All narratives were gathered in their language of creation, except for Pierre Gilles’ original Latin text from 1561, De Bosporo thracio, which we analyzed in Turkish translation.

8 This account omits the problem cases that nobody wanted to keep in the dataset, for the obvious reason that they were easy to solve and did not cause any friction.