In Spatial Humanities, A Project of the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, Jo Guldi discusses what is a spatial turn and the spatial turn in literature.

In order for one to understand what a spatial turn is, one must first consider what a turn is. According to Jo Guldi “Humanities scholars speak of a quantitative turn in history in the 1960s, a linguistic and cultural turn of the 1980s in history and literature, and even more recently an animal turn. Beyond the academy, to turn implies retrospection, a process of stopping in the road and glancing backwards at the way by which one has come.” Spatial turn is an intellectual movement that, places emphasis on place and space in social science and humanities. Spatial turns also known as landscape turns, are referred to throughout the academic disciplines, with reference to GIS and the neogeography revolution that puts mapping within the grasp of every high-school student. When one says “turning”, a proposal is made to the backwards glance at the reasons why travellers from a variety of disciplines become fixated upon the landscape together. Landscape can refer to a worldview, the commons and community and territoriality that are older than GIS where their roots are the foundations of the modern disciplines.

Spatial Turn represents the impulse to position new tools such as GIS against old questions. Every discipline in humanities and social sciences has been stamped with the imprint of spatial questions that can be about nations and their boundaries, states and surveillance, private property or the perception of the landscape. All of these have fallen into contestation during the nineteenth century. Utilizing the ability to review the period of spatial emergence from 1880 to 1960 can help an individual to understand the imprint of these questions and the direction that interdisciplinary collaboration may take in the GIS spatial era.

In the spatial turn in Literature, the official tools of spatial investigation such as where; “Parisian police studied the crowd in different neighborhoods for signs of revolutionary behavior. The sanitary, criminal, and poverty maps of London, Paris, and Chicago” – Jo Guldi, were alongside literary investigations of different neighbourhoods which were designed by urban journalists to help middle-class travellers digest the urban scenes through the rubric of tourism. Descriptions of urban life, as such, readily described the appearance that differentiated the crowd of certain neighbourhoods. Where the authors described the figures, the dress of the crowds and the habits of the crowds in detail, they were merely lending colour and substance to the identification of the street. For example, according to Jo Guldi, “James Grant’s Travels in Town (1839) carefully differentiated the different types of crowds, interactions, and commerce associated with arriving in London via Mile End, Islington, the docks, and King’s Cross.”

Such details of the landscape precipitated an investigation into the social nature along the borders of those spaces. The fictional accounts of the nineteenth century emphasized the encounters along the borders of the different worlds, which were at most, haphazard. Literary historians embraced the imaginal as a tool for mining close reading, where opportunities were presented to philosophize upon the changing categories of self and others suggested by highly imaginative forms of historical landscape description taken from the reading and experience.