The TopoFiles

The Name:
TopoFiles is a play on topophila, which, in the words of its generator and greatest champion Yi Fu Tuan, is “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (Topophilia, 4). The TopoFiles is a website dedicated to exploring this bond through the writing of American lifestyle bloggers.

The Story:
This a study of place in the age of the “global village,” of what it means, and how the meanings play out in today’s version of the diary: the life blog. Here in the computer-loaded USA, hundreds of thousands of citizens have mastered the art of transferring snippets of their lives to textboxes. Some are spartan, some are deeply emotional, some are devoid of photos, some are basically Flikr accounts with captions, some are updated twice a day, some twice a month- but these differences are superficial. More interesting to me are the differences in rhetoric and content, and what causes them. Do the discrepancies in voice, style, and subject of North American lifestyle bogs have regional patterns and if so, do these patterns mirror those put forth in previous literary geography studies? To find out, I analyzed blogs from every region in the U.S. (all, for accuracy’s sake, written by bloggers in the mid-30s and under range), pulled out first their individual and then regional characteristics, and compared both to the characteristics considered essential to the region’s literature.

Behind the madness, methodology:
The first step was finding the blogs. I did this in a very piecemeal, dribs and drabs-type way, starting last spring and continuing through this summer. This explains the gaps- why, for example, there are so many Ohio blogs and so few Vermont ones (sorry Vermont!).
Still, once my list spanned all fifty states, I divvied them up into (perhaps not the most accurate) regions- New England (ME, VT, NH, MA, RI, CT), Mid Atlantic (NY, PA, NJ), DelMar (DE, MD), South Atlantic (VA, NC, SC), Appalachia (WV, TN, KT), Rust Belt (OH, WI, MI, IL, IN), Heartland (IA, MN, MO, IN), Great Plains (ND, SD, KS, NE), Deep South (GA, LA, AL, MS, AR), Southwest (TX, OK, AZ, NM), Mountain (UT, NV, CO, WY, MT), and Pacific (CA, OR, WA). I didn’t put Hawaii, Florida, and Alaska into any of the above groups, as I wasn’t sure their voices, especially Hawaii’s, fit in.

Once grouped, I analyzed each blog individually, noting expressions and quirks, sentence structure and rhetorical traits, voice, categories, and privacy levels. After the individual analyses, I started pulling out region characteristics, reflected in the current Expressions/Quirks, Linguistically Speaking, Voice, Categories, and Privacy posts.

And now, I’m taking each region’s defining blogging characteristics and comparing them to the defining literary ones- what, if anything, in Southern/Midwestern/North Eastern etc… lifestyle blogs aligns with the textbook elements of Southern/Midwestern/Northeastern literature?

Thus far, I’ve only completed blog-vs-book analyses for the Rust Belt, Pacific Northwest, Deep South, and Appalachian regions, but fret not, I mean to get through all of them!

If you have any questions about the project in general, or you are a profiled blogger and don’t agree with where I’ve placed you, or would prefer that I not publicly scrutinize your work, you can email me -cdw250@nyu.edu.