The Geography of Misreading: When Spatialisation Becomes Demography

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 138):

Spatialisation was much less common in the corpus, most likely due to the ambient nature of the communication rendering geographical co-location is less of a shared variable. The US spelling of ‘mom’ in the #momguilt hashtag, probably meant that the data tended to be produced by people residing in the US, as (27) suggests.

(27) American moms: let's stop feeling guilty and start getting mad [URL to article in the Guardian with same title] #MothersDay #motherhood #momguilt #workersrights #paygap #femalelabor #equalpay

Some spatialisation resources acted to introduce a political inflection to the variety of

#momguilt at stake, both sourcing and convoking to a specified collective community.

(28) Thanks to @motherwellmag for re-posting this piece. We need to take care of ourselves and our country at the same time. #momguilt [embedded post: We are already made to feel guilty, as mothers, about so many things, we musn’t add political activism to the list. [URL]]

(29) A lot of horrible stuff exists in the world.. In this country thankfully not the case (islamophobic attacks against kids ). AND there is no oppressing a 4 year old - because if she wants a sparkly clip or a sparkly headscarf.. that 4 year old is getting it - #momguilt

ChatGPT Comments: 

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna’s discussion of spatialisation reveals a familiar but persistent slippage in the modelling of context: the conflation of contextual variables with empirical correlates. Here, spatialisation is treated primarily in terms of where participants are located in the physical world (“people residing in the US”), rather than how spatial relations are semiotically construed within texts. This represents a drift from context as culture potential to context as metadata.

From a systemic functional perspective, spatialisation—if theorised as a contextual parameter—should describe how meanings are organised around the construal of place relations: how proximity, distance, directionality, or co-presence are mobilised as resources for interpersonal alignment or ideational positioning. By contrast, the authors’ treatment frames spatialisation as an empirical descriptor of the data source (“US spelling of ‘mom’”) rather than a variable of contextual meaning. This renders “space” as a sociological filter rather than a semiotic dimension.

Even the examples given—posts involving U.S. motherhood and national identity—suggest that the genuinely interesting question lies not in geography per se, but in the semiotic spatialisation of belonging: how motherhood and national affiliation are aligned or disaligned through language. Yet the analysis does not pursue this. “This country,” in example (29), could have opened an inquiry into the interplay between symbolic space (nationhood) and the affective space of parenting—how “our country” functions as a collective spatial metaphor that intersects with guilt, care, and identity. Instead, the focus remains at the level of demographic inference.

The result is that spatialisation risks becoming a descriptive convenience rather than a theoretically integrated category. Rather than extending the tuning model into a spatial dimension of contextual meaning, it momentarily collapses into corpus annotation—a return to data geography rather than discourse semantics.