Ellis Schriefer

In my dissertation, I analyze how distinct narrative forms (literature, poetry, photography, performance, journalism, and documentary) from the 20th century to today mediate the formation of two geographic urban spaces and imbue them with meaning. How did narrative forms generated in and about Barcelona’s central neighborhood of El Raval (formerly referred to as the “barri xino” or “barrio chino”) and Madrid’s central neighborhood of Lavapiés (within Embajadores) shape these unique and culturally resonant neighborhoods? This project will apply natural language processing to Spanish/Catalan newspaper articles to determine positive or negative impressions of two neighborhoods in Spain. I'm interested in determining how the neighborhood perceives their own space and then the type of language that mainstream news uses to talk about these two immigrant neighborhoods.