A Computational Approach to Urban Space in Science Fiction

Abstract

This study analyzes the presence of urban space in 20th century science fiction in English using computational methods. Three theoretical approaches are used to model urban space as a measurable feature. First, urban space is formalized as a topic. LDA topic modeling is used to retrieve the urban topic from the corpus and estimate its presence in each book. Secondly, urban space is formalized as the sum of the linguistic fragments that form a setting. A list of urban terms is created and their frequency is measured for each novel. Lastly, cityspace is formalized as the number of references to urban locations. Textual Geographies’ geographic data was used to measure the presence of named urban locations in each book. The results of these approaches all point to similar conclusions. A low presence of urban space is found in science fiction compared to general fiction, alongside a historical trend. Urban presence in science fiction is greater at the beginning of the 20th century, declines in the 30s and 40s, and successively increases in the 50s. No such dip is present in other types of fiction across the twentieth century.

Keywords:

• distant reading,
• science fiction,
• english literature,
• 20th century literature,
• urban,
• space