This chapter addresses the challenge of socially "starting from scratch" when moving into a community of approximately 150,000 older adults. It suggests that most residents integrate into overlapping place-, leisure-, and faith-based communities, and experience varying levels of psychological sense of community (PSOC). The chapter also explores the few instances where no PSOC was reported and examines the multiple tensions between different groups based on age, type of residency, and political orientation.

The Introduction begins with a description of the final days in the life of Sofia’s main thermal bath that in 1913 stood in the city’s historic center as the last representative of the Ottoman approach to place-making. I show how the decision to demolish one of the structures most characteristic of Sofia’s Ottoman experience cleared the path for the formulation of the national narrative of Sofia’s history. The narrative that still dominates both the scholarly and popular ideas of Sofia’s urbanistic identity is based on an ideologically biased interpretation of the Ottoman understanding of urban space, natural resource management, and public works. In the Introduction, I argue that Sofia’s key position within the Ottoman political and institutional landscapes as well as its role as a hub of cultural and technological exchange make the study of its history a good vantage point for overcoming the artificial spatial boundaries that still divide the research of the European, Asian, and African provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The Introduction shows how the environmental characteristics of Sofia and the Sofia plain make water the most natural and effective thematic pivot for the study of the construction and historical evolution of space and place.

This chapter begins with a re-reading of Henri Lefebvre’s theorisation of social space and representation in his influential volume, The Production of Space (1974). Since the appearance of its English translation in 1991, Lefebvre’s theories have proved to be foundational for much of the work on literature and space that has emerged over the previous few decades, particularly his distinction between representations of space and representational spaces. The chapter thus traces the impact of Lefebvre’s work upon various literary critics and cultural geographers, exploring the development of ideas of textual space, concepts of space and place, and the relation between material and metaphorical spaces. The chapter then moves to consider the concept of scale, an idea somewhat neglected by Lefebvre, but which has begun to gain traction with critics writing on, for example, world literature and modernism (such as Nirvana Tanoukhi, Susan Stanford Friedman, and the essays in the 2017 volume edited by Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg). Thinking through the question of ‘what is the scale of the literary object’ (as posed by Rebecca Walkowitz) thus offers a new way to understand the complex relations between representation, literary texts, and diverse forms of social space (local, regional, national, transnational, global).

This chapter draws on a tradition of work on geographies of the sensory and the embodied to develop a reading of Tracy Chevalier’s novel The Last Runaway as a case study in sensory literary geography. It reads the text as both the story of a Quaker immigrant set in a fictional nineteenth-century Ohio and as the story of that setting embodied in the experiences of a fictional Quaker settler. The first half of the chapter provides a brief outline of the kind of literary geography practiced in this reading, emphasising in particular its interest in the inseparability of geographies, events, and characters as they function in the creation of fictional worlds. It highlights four aspects to this way of reading: first, its framing within the theory and practice of literary geography; second, its interest in the idea of ‘spatiality’; third, the idea that an understanding of spatiality as the spatial-social might prompt a rethinking of the narrative category of setting; and, finally, its grounding in work on embodied and sensory geographies. The second half of the chapter then explores in detail how Chevalier’s narrative style enables her to articulate the human geography of The Last Runaway through embodied human-scale sensory experiences.

This chapter introduces the book, laying out its central questions, including what it means to be postdigital, what diverse kinds of life and humanity can be found in screens, and what new technologies such as automation and AI might mean for screen lives. Chapter 1 also describes both the background and aspirations of the book, as well as its structure and a guide on how to approach reading it. Beyond discussing the defining research questions, this chapter also details the ideas underpinning the book, including the notion that there has been a tangible shift between how we related to screens a decade ago and how we do now. In addition, the book is guided by an awareness of the often conflicting and intricate relationships people have with screens, as well as the concept of the ‘smallness of screen lives’, inspired by Deborah Hicks’ notion. The Comfort of Screens is a tapestry which unfolds a story of postdigital life, sewn from the fabric of 17 people’s screen lives, interviews with whom form the backbone of the book. These ‘crescent voices’ are also introduced in this chapter.

Opening with an analysis of Instagram, Chapter 2 is concerned with how to think about postdigitality. Touching on multimodality, time-space-place, and responsive loops, this chapter highlights the contrast between digital life and postdigital life, unravelling the many dimensions of postdigitality. It concludes that postdigitality represents a world of symbiosis, whether that be of body and mind, physical life and screen life, representation and non-representation, immersion and connectivity, or interaction and convergence. These combinations are what lends digital media its unique power to move across time, space, and place. To explore these ideas, Chapter 2 analyses data which has been processed through ATLAS.ti to produce a list of postdigital keywords used by crescent voices.

This chapter begins with a reflection of the Find My iPhone app, employing it as an example of how physical and digital place can exist simultaneously and in interconnected ways. Afterwards, it turns to explaining the notion of physical-digital place as parallel universes, subsequently unravelling this idea through strands taken from across crescent voice interviews. The emphasis of this chapter is on place, or more specifically the intermingling of physical and digital places, whereby the commitments, practices, and imaginaries of screens can shape one’s understandings of place and allow one to form a consciousness that is a kind of home. By employing notions of the ‘digital home’, social imaginaries, digital twins, and a postdigital concept of community, this chapter unsettles the binary between digital and physical spaces, employing Dezuanni’s definition of community to help get at the ways that online spaces feel like home. It explores these ideas primarily through crescent voices and their experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic, an event which lent more prominence to practices such as digital twins.

Chapter 6 reads Horace’s Odes as thoroughly place-based lyric poetry. The chapter begins by differentiating its approach from landscape and symbolic readings of place. It organizes an account of the Odes around the concepts of place and place attachment, familiar from the Eclogues. Horace represents dynamic experiences of specific localities, constituted by human and nonhuman beings. He anchors his poetry to particular locations, while also making those locations real-and-textual sites of Horatian poetry. In addition, Horace represents place as helping to produce and shape his poetry through tropes of lyric ecology and poetic reciprocity. The second half of the chapter complicates this place-based reading of Horace by attending to the pervasive theme of mobility in the Odes. It argues that Horace models a translocal poetics, in which locality is continually fashioned and refashioned through forms of translation and transport. Whereas forced movement in the Eclogues means the end of local dwelling and local song alike, for Horace mobility helps create both his local place attachments and a form of lyric that is place-based but not place-bound.

The introduction calls for a mutually enriching dialogue between ancient texts and environmental literary criticism, contextualizing the book in relation to ecocriticism and classical scholarship. It also establishes the key terms of the book’s approach – place, environment, and ecology – and distinguishes these from the unreflective use of the concept of nature. Finally, the introduction sketches the contextual background for Vergil’s and Horace’s environmental interests, noting a range of ancient traditions and discourses that took the nonhuman world seriously as a site of interest and inquiry. These include literary forebears like Sappho, Hesiod, Theocritus, and Lucretius; cultural traditions such as the Roman fascination with land surveying and agricultural treatises; political contexts like the expansion and consolidation of a quasi-global Roman empire; philosophical traditions from the Presocratics to Stoicism and Epicureanism; and religious traditions. Reading Horace and Vergil as environmental poets does not mean projecting modern sensibilities onto ancient texts but rather seeing how these authors pursue their own, different interests in place, ecology, and the environment.

Chapter 1 examines how locality matters to the Eclogues, and how the poetry collection conceptualizes and constructs local place. In Eclogues 1 and 9, Vergil stresses the importance of local dwelling, representing multifaceted place attachments between individuals and their familiar homes. At the same time, in dramatizing the effects of land confiscations, Vergil probes the highly contingent nature of place, defined by unstable boundaries and through power relations. In addition to providing new readings of these particular poems, this chapter lays the foundation for the rest of the book by exploring the concept of local place and showing how a multifaceted examination of place making and place attachment offers a more nuanced and fuller reading than a focus on landscape, nature, or an opposition between town and country. The chapter then turns to an apparent problem with this place-based reading of the Eclogues: the poems’ ambiguous settings. Drawing on Theocritus and Cicero, it shows that the Eclogues are interested in the many intersections and cross-fertilizations between actual and fictional places. The poems construct local places, even if they cannot be located.

This chapter explores the interplay between space production, place qualification, and market-making. It argues that market-making is closely tied to space creation, with competing socio-technical arrangements shaping and economizing space. Understanding market site qualification is crucial for grasping the relationship between marketplaces and spaces, as it involves equipping agencies to co-produce site characteristics alongside goods therein. Further, market sites are influenced by non-economic factors alongside economic arrangements, serving as spaces for social interaction and inclusivity beyond their economic function. Examining the reciprocal relationship between market spaces and places, a case study on the changes made in the Irish pub during the Covid-19 pandemic is presented. The pandemic disrupted economic activities, leading to the reconfiguration of market sites to comply with public health measures. Irish pubs serve as an illustrative example, being significant market sites for the alcohol and hospitality industries as well as community pillars. However, during the pandemic, the social interactions and alcohol consumption at the heart of pub life posed serious public health risks. This created conflicting priorities, with commercial interests pushing for pub reopening while public health authorities called for closure. The chapter highlights the qualification process of market sites and how these dynamics impact the relationship between marketplaces and spaces, with the Covid-19 pandemic serving as a catalyst for change.

The Conclusion chapter reiterates the book’s approach, focus and main points. It reminds the reader that the book has concentrated on local, provincial, peripatetic and otherwise relatively marginal sites of scientific activity and shown how a wide variety of spaces were constituted and reconfigured as meteorological observatories. The conclusion reiterates the point that nineteenth-century meteorological observatories, and indeed the very idea of observatory meteorology, were under constant scrutiny. The conclusion interrogates four crucial conditions of these observatory experiments: the significance of geographical particularity in justifications of observatory operations; the sustainability of coordinated observatory networks at a distance; the ability to manage, manipulate and interpret large datasets; and the potential public value of meteorology as it was prosecuted in observatory settings. Finally, the chapter considers the use of historic weather data in recent attempts by climate scientists to reconstruct past climates and extreme weather events.

This essay examines the work of several poets (including Langston Hughes, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Christopher Leland, Julie Gard, Heiu Minh Nguyen, Danez Smith, and Rane Arroyo) who engage the Midwest as a resonant source for writing about a host of topics pertaining to queer self-awareness, belonging, and memory. Not unlike the work of recent scholars aiming to dislodge the rural in particular and the Midwest more broadly as a site of unbridled anti-LGBT sentiment and politics, the essay illustrates how these poets refuse essentialist beliefs about the Midwest to instead register the myriad queer histories, cultures, and experiences stemming from America’s heartland. Furthermore, as it considers the inextricable bond between “the Midwest” and “the rural,” the essay illustrates how the urban Midwest additionally requires consideration for the way that cities like Minneapolis, Detroit, and Chicago are indeed part and parcel of the heartland yet frequently eclipsed by the customary association of gay liberation with major metropolitan coastal cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.