Of narrative time and space: geography meets history via linguistics

Abstract The article explores issues of narrative time and space. It embraces a conception of geography, of space, as place involving relations among people, with ‘their own stories to tell’. And as story, as narrative, geography can be captured by a ‘story grammar’: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How (the 5 Ws + H). When and Where, time and space, are the fundamental axes of narrative, different cultures differently grounding narrative in time (the ‘once upon a time’ of Western culture) or in space (the Western Apaches of Arizona). The article explores the ways in which new computational tools allow us to understand and represent actors and their actions in the setting of time and space, ways for geography to meet history, via linguistics. The article illustrates the geographical and historical implications of the approach by focusing on lynching narratives from hundreds of newspaper articles (Georgia, 1875–1930).