Referent: Dr. Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez (University College Cork)
Abstract:
The crime fiction genre in the Catalan-speaking context has experienced unprecedented growth over the last two decades, emerging as one of the most dynamic areas of contemporary Catalan literature. This talk will analyse the evolution of Catalan crime fiction from a digital geocritical perspective, focusing on the decentralisation of narrative spaces over a 70-year period (1953–2023). While Barcelona has traditionally been at the epicentre of Catalan noir, reflecting its prominence as a cultural and urban hub, the genre’s increasing diversification has seen significant spatial shifts toward peripheral and rural locations as the site of the narrative. The study I will present in this talk aims to map and quantify this transformation by combining quantitative and qualitative methods, including text mining, geoparsing, and visualisation via Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Using distant reading techniques and close textual analysis, we analyze a corpus of 92 crime fiction works to trace the chronology and extent of these geographical shifts, interrogating both urban centrality and rural peripherality in Catalan noir.
Kurzbio:
Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez ist Dozent für Digital Humanities am University College Cork in Irland, wo er zudem bereits in der School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures tätig war. In seiner Forschung befasst er sich mit literarischen Räumen im Kontext minorisierter iberischer Sprachen und Kulturen – insbesondere unter Einsatz computergestützter Textanalyseverfahren und geografischer Visualisierungen (GIS). Darüber hinaus interessiert er sich für mehrsprachige Ansätze innerhalb der Digital Humanities, Nachhaltigkeit sowie die Maker-Community.
Er ist Mitorganisator der GeoHumanities CIG innerhalb der Alliance of Digital Humanities Associations (ADHO), Präsident der Associació d’Humanitats Digitals Catalanes (AHDCat) sowie Mitorganisator der Multilingual Digital Humanities CIG der UK and Ireland Digital Humanities Association.