Corpus

This page lists the growing corpus of the project. This corpus is divided into three sub-corpora that can be accessed here:

The North American Corpus

The Nordic Corpus

The Sub-Saharan Corpus

Analysing the corpus

The texts that are a part of this corpus will be studied with the help of two complementing methodologies: close readingand a digital humanities-supported version of what literary theorist Franco Moretti has called distant reading. Close reading is the dominant hermeneutic methodology in literary studies and involves very careful scrutiny of particular passages. When combined with a historical and materialist perspective, it is capable of revealing how texts speak to (or register) relevant historical and political developments as well as prevalent power relationships in local and global society. When trying to understand what modern climate fiction is actually saying about food, eating, the food system and the future, this is an essential methodology. However, it is also very time-consuming and makes it difficult to effectively study a great number of texts. It is also not designed to detect trends in a large material. Distant reading is a much more shallow type of analysis where digital versions of individual texts and entire corpora are explored with the help of software capable of identifying keywords, phrases and collocates in these texts and corpora. This is helpful when searching for passages where food, eating, specific diets, food systems or other foodways are located. Such quantitative analysis can also help determine how much more common certain foodways are in the text (for instance, is meat-based diets more or less often referred to in American climate fiction than in Nordic climate fiction, or when compared to American realist fiction from the period 1950-2000?) By combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies, it will be easier to detect the transformation of food imaginaries over time, to compare fiction from the three different regions, and to consider the generalizability of the study.

The preliminary findings will be presented on this home page via a series of blog posts https://foodimagine.org/blog/. The blog posts are written for the general public and avoid overly academic language. The findings will also be published in the form of four articles where the first three discuss climate fiction from the three regions, and the fourth compares the findings. These peer-reviewed and open access articles are designed to speak to an academic scholarly and scientific community. All articles will consider the relevance of the study to stakeholders and climate scientists.