A Keyword
Analysis of Climate Change in Contemporary
Literary Studies, 2000-2022Matt MorgensternPurdue Universitymorgenst@purdue.eduAlliance of Digital Humanities OrganizationsAssociation for Computers and the Humanities00067201713 February 2023article
This is the source
DHQ classification scheme; full list available at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/taxonomy.xmlKeywords supplied by author; no controlled vocabularyDHQ project registry; full list available at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/projects.xmlThe version history for this file can be found on GitHub
In not only classrooms but also digital spaces, conceptual keywords are rich tools for scholarship, teaching, and research. This article analyzes climate change as a keyword in contemporary literary studies to assess how the keyword's occurence in the MLA International Bibliography frames metadata engagement. Encouraging access to scholarship through effective keyword selection enables finding, citing, and responding to important scholarship. Among other fields, contemporary literary studies and the digital humanities will benefit from shared terms of engagement to encourage precision with terms in a variety of contexts. Drawing on bibliometric analysis tools, I analyze indexed citations from four academic journals: ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; Contemporary Literature; MFS Modern Fiction Studies; and PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association. Working with ISLE as a reference case and the latter three as test cases, I find that the occurence of climate change as a keyword is less than that of a different, broader keyword: enviromental crisis. The disjunction in occurence rates between these two terms provides a keyword problematic that requires further review. For each corpus, I discuss the ramifications of this keyword problematic by highlighting significant intersections and disconnections. To conclude, I reflect on the benefits of standardized indexing practices for contemporary literary studies, the digital humanities, and emergent fields such as the digital environmental humanities.
This article explores the uptake of the term "climate change" in contemporary literary studies.
The Marxist scholar and critic Raymond Williams was one of the first to suggest
the importance of keywords for literary studies. Originally published in 1976,
Williams’s book
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and
Society challenges conceptions of everyday terms through historical
analysis. Specifically, Williams’s keywords demonstrate how shared discourse
changes over time. As Williams notes, When we come to say ‘we just don’t speak
the same language’ we mean something more general: that we have different
immediate values or different kinds of valuation, or that we are aware, often
intangibly, of different formations and distributions of energy and interest. Studying conceptual keywords in this view not only
enables insights into semantic shifts but also reveals how historically
contingent conditions embed themselves within such shifts. As such, composing
keyword entries revealed to Williams that words which seem to have been there
for centuries, with continuous general meanings, have come in fact to express
radically different or radically variable, yet sometimes hardly noticed,
meanings and implications of meaning. These insights have since
generated a rich tradition of keyword analysis projects in the humanities,
including but not limited to select critical theory books, the Living Lexicon
series from the journal Environmental Humanities, as well
as the Keywords series from New York University Press,
which includes entries on disability, gender and sexuality, and environmental
studies.
Since Williams, scholars have relied on keywords in reading, writing, and
teaching. For many, a different kind of keyword engagement influences
research methods. Keyword indexing in databases such as the Modern Language
Association (MLA) International Bibliography facilitates access to published
scholarship’s metadata. Selecting effective keywords on such databases enables
the act of finding, citing, and responding to scholarship. Scholars interested
in climate change, for instance, search databases for articles that effectively
deal with the topic’s complexity, which, as Andrew Ross [2016] notes, connects
to historical ramifications for scientific knowledge and planetary, geopolitical
conflict . However, it is important to note for not only contemporary
literary studies but also the digital humanities that disjunctions in database
indexing impede digital access to scholarship. In this article, I explore how
select academic journals from contemporary literary studies exemplify this
disjunction through the occurrence of climate change as a keyword. Applying
the VOSviewer bibliometric analysis tool, I analyze thousands of unique
citations in four academic journals representative of work in contemporary
literary studies that scholars in the field consider trendsetters. Large
datasets of bibliographic data allow us to survey scholarship through their
indexed citations and authorial networks . Digital bibliometric analyses
therefore enable scaled-up analyses of how keywords impact precise framing of
and engagement with indexed research.
The field of contemporary literary studies presents a valuable case study in how
we categorize humanistic scholarship about climate change and related
environmental issues because its scholarship reviews direct representations of
climate change. Owing to established fields such as ecocriticism, the discipline
enjoys many conferences, journal articles, and monographs dedicated to climate
change , and
scholarship will only proliferate in the coming years. Digital humanists will
thus benefit from looking at the use of keywords in contemporary literary
studies. The field reflects ongoing some of the more significant developments in
humanities scholarship on myriad environmental issues, including but not limited
to climate change. Deriving insights from a bibliometric analysis of
contemporary literary studies will, in turn, suggest new possibilities for
indexing scholarship that encourage engagement and access. While I go into more
detail about the results below, this project’s central purpose is to identify
how climate change occurs as an object of scholarly inquiry in the humanities
through its use as a keyword in contemporary literary studies.
Corpus and Methods
The following sections encompass a bibliometric analysis of four journals from
contemporary literary studies:
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies
in Literature and Environment (ISLE); Contemporary Literature (CL); MFS Modern Fiction Studies (MFS);
and PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association
(PMLA). I analyze the ISLE
corpus as a reference case for the occurrence of climate change as a
keyword in a journal explicitly interested in environmental issues. With this
corpus as a basis, I compare the other three corpora as benchmarks of
contemporary literary studies scholarship. In selecting journals for analysis, I
gathered indexed citations from journals with approximately 500-750 results in
the MLA International Bibliography. These results derive from filtering out
non-English language results and citations that occur prior to 2000. The ISLE corpus counts 665 unique citations; the CL corpus counts 620; the MFS
corpus counts 763; and the PMLA corpus counts 1,964.
Though I considered journals such as Environmental Humanities
and Resilience: A Journal of Environmental
Humanities as supplemental reference cases to ISLE, they were excluded because their indexed citation counts in the
MLA International Bibliography were less than 500 at the time of data collection.
Although the periodization of contemporary literature is highly contested
, my scope includes literature published from 1985 to
the present while limiting scholarship on said literature from 2000 to early
2022. I adopt this timeline because I am most interested in scholarship that
addresses recent representations of climate change that benefit from engagement
(or lack thereof) with the past three decades of climate science. At the same
time, I acknowledge that these journals — besides
ISLE — do
not tally significant counts of climate change as a keyword because the topic
was likely peripheral to their interests up until the last decade. However, I
find them valuable test cases because they have since published on the topic
and, thus, can be analyzed as a corpus with keyword connections that either do
or do not reflect the topic’s many connections. With these variables in mind, I
assembled each journal’s corpus, limiting their indexed citations in the MLA
International Bibliography to English-language citations from 2000 to the
present. This corpus reflects the reviewed journal’s index counts as of
January 24, 2022; it therefore does not include citations indexed after
data gathering. The corpus is available for review on request. I
then exported the citations as research information system files to process with
VOSviewer, a bibliometrics tool with modularity algorithms for visualizing
author networks and keyword occurrence clusters . I
initially isolated keywords that occur at least ten times in the top fifty
keywords across the run of journal articles and book reviews, removing keywords
that convey period duration or generalist categories. For each journal’s
corpus, I removed select keywords that disproportionately impacted the
visualizations. While select keywords do not occur in each corpus (unlike
CL and MFS, PMLA’s scope extends its range to medieval literary
studies, which leads to keywords such as 1500-1599 and 1600-1699), the
listed keywords reappear frequently enough across corpora to justify
exclusion: 400-1499,1100-middle English,1500-1599,1600-1699,1700-1799,1800-1899,1900-1999,2000-2009,english language
literature,fiction,prose,short story, and film. I began
with 10 keyword occurrences because that number suggests a keyword’s relative
frequency in a corpus of at least 500 citations. If a climate change cluster
did not emerge at ten keywords, I decreased the occurrence count to five and, if
necessary, one keyword to find the climate change keyword cluster. I
simultaneously increased the top count in permutations of 50, 100, and 1,000,
while decreasing the occurrence count (if a cluster does not emerge in the top
fifty, it will emerge at subsequent scales). I followed these steps to
determine the relative significance of climate change as a keyword in each
reviewed corpus.
While this article derives inspiration for bibliometric analyses elsewhere in
literary studies , it also follows bibliometric
analyses in applied environmental sciences that propose new avenues for research
. Reconciling differences between these projects will inform framings
of climate change in digital humanities research and points to the utility of
digital interventions in the environmental humanities. Survey approaches of
contemporary literary studies, ecocriticism, and the environment humanities
precede this project, as we see in select articles from Ursula K. Heise [2006a]
[2006b] [2008] [2013]. But because digital humanities tools can analyze
thousands of citations in databases, scaled-up bibliometric analyses can determine common terms of engagement between otherwise
disconnected disciplines. As such, I focus on climate change as a keyword
because keywords such as climate malaise,climate fatigue, and climate
perturbation are not commonly recognized. The project also must rely on the
keywords provided by the indexers of the MLA International Bibliography:
climate change is the keyword because it is what appears on the database. I
follow this parameter because climate change is a discursive
mainstay, a keyword in the truest sense of Williams’s work. For example, a brief
search for publications with Environment in the Scopus database reveals the
predominance of climate change as a keyword (both for authors and the database
indexers) in pertinent research. Of 2,000 publications surveyed, selecting for
at least 10 keyword occurrences, the keyword for climate change occurs in 188
articles with 723 links to other pertinent topics such as carbon,drought,
and climate models (Fig. 1). As of October 21, 2022.
While not the leading keyword in the Scopus corpus (these being article,controlled study, and nonhuman), climate change is in the top 15, indicating its
relative significance. As a keyword, then, climate change presents significant
inroads for a variety of ecological issues with which literary studies, as well
as the digital humanities, will benefit from informed engagement.
When evaluating the corpora, I do not critique any author, journal, or publisher
for how a given citation does or does not employ certain keywords. This is in
part because the MLA International Bibliography’s keyword selection process is
unclear. The Modern Language Association’s website for the database notes the
number of indexers who cite publications and the thousands of terms they use
for indexing , but
does not mention if keywords derive from authors, journals, or other parties. I
also do not know if the initial stage of keyword selection affects later
indexing of pertinent metadata. I therefore survey this corpus of journal
citations mindful of the many components that result in a keyword’s appearance
in a scholarly database. The article’s conclusion considers how responding to
these limitations may inspire more effective indexing practices for future
digital environmental humanities projects, in addition to future
contemporary literary studies and digital humanities scholarship (not to say
that the two are distinct). These digital environmental humanities projects include not only analyses of
emergent cultural forms , but also ongoing conversations about how the digital humanities
will respond to climate change through its methods, tools, and critiques of
extant technologies .
Reference Case: ISLE
Since its 1993 debut,
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in
Literature and Environment (hereafter ISLE) has
served as a hub for environmental scholarship in literary studies. As its editors wrote in its first issue, ISLE’s founding reflects the rapid growth of ecological criticism in
the United States in recent years, which in turn reflects the steady increase in
the production of environmental literature and nature writing over the past
several decades and the attendant increased visibility of such writing in
college literature courses. At the time of writing, 29 volumes of ISLE have been published as part of the Association
for the Study of Literature and environment. The journal’s mission statement
pinpoints its influence as a pillar for literary studies: Celebrating the rich
confluence of environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and environmental
justice, ISLE welcomes submissions from authors creatively engaging these fields
from a broad range of disciplines, geographies, and perspectives. ISLE invites
scholarly articles and creative writing that interpret the environment in
complex, imaginative, and generative ways. Owing to the journal’s long
publication history and dedicated interest in the ways cultural texts grapple
with environmental issues, and how these issues are explored through such genres
as climate fiction and ecopoetics, ISLE presents a
fruitful archive for bibliometric analysis. I therefore refer to ISLE as a reference case that generates an array of keywords for literary studies scholarship concerned with the environment.
The
ISLE corpus presents multiple occurrences of climate
change as a keyword. The VOSviewer tool presents clusters that cohere around
significant keyword occurrences at various scales. Links between clusters
suggest the relative significance of keywords to other relevant topics of
interest. An initial reading of the ISLE corpus suggests
the significance of keywords (referred to as subject terms in the MLA
International Bibliography) such as ecocritical approach,american
literature, and nature (Fig. 2), many of which characterize the initial
stages of ecocriticism in the US.
While these keyword clusters are the most frequent at a scale of 10 occurrences in
the top 50, they are not the most recent. More recent clusters of significance
include postapocalyptic novel,environmental crisis, and climate change.
The environmental crisis keyword occurs 85 times, with 29 links to other
clusters; the climate change keyword occurs 18 times with 13 links. As we can
read environmental crisis in several ways, a discrepancy emerges between these
two keywords in the
ISLE corpus. Does environmental
crisis refer to climate change, a mass extinction event, or something else
entirely? Does indexing environmental crisis preclude the mention of climate
change, making the keywords mutually exclusive?
Closer analysis of the
ISLE clusters hardly distinguishes
the keywords. Scaling down from ten to five keyword occurrences produces
environmental crisis and climate change nodes with more connections in the
top 50: the former adds 23 links for a total of 52 connections while the latter
gains three for a total of 16. The node for environmental crisis links with
meat,petroleum industry, and social justice. The node for climate
change does not link to any nodes not already connected to environmental
crisis, suggesting that the conceptual keyword of environmental crisis
includes but is not limited to climate change. Three ISLE articles in the corpus indexed with climate change are also
indexed with environmental crisis. Our empirical knowledge of climate change daily evolves with
applied modeling and research, Though well-documented across the globe,
reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offer the
most current scientific consensus on climate change. and, whether
in popular media coverage or in everyday conversation, we commonly do not
associate the phrase environmental crisis with ecological catastrophe more
than we do climate change. As a conceptual keyword, climate change is
commonplace among environmental humanists, scientists, and policymakers alike.
At the same time, the conceptual keyword environmental
crisis may lend itself to complexities that climate change does not present
because the former touches on issues such as pollution, biodiversity loss, and
changing ecosystems. These more specific problems and their local occurrences
are not always direct effects of climate change. Consequently, indexing an
article with the keyword environmental crisis may misrepresent its account of
environmental issues that require further contextualization.
It should not surprise us that climate change occurs significantly in the
ISLE corpus. Yet it is surprising that the
environmental crisis cluster seemingly absorbs the climate change cluster in
that the former attaches to topics discussed in concert with climate science.
Though I argue that the distinction between environmental crisis and climate
change remains significant, the ISLE reference corpus
presents a valuable example of wrestling with the two keywords as only two among
many in its set. Now that we have seen a sampling of keywords from the ISLE corpus, we can see how these keywords emerge, or do
not emerge, in the other corpora that are not exclusively concerned with the
environmental humanities.
Test Cases: Contemporary Literature, MFS, and PMLA
This section reviews the
Contemporary Literature (CL), MFS Modern Fiction Studies
(MFS), and Publications of the
Modern Language Association (PMLA) corpora.
While these journals have not historically foregrounded climate change as an
object of inquiry, I look to their corpora to consider how their recent keywords
reflect contemporary literary studies’ emergent interests in climate change.
With the ISLE keywords as a reference for work elsewhere
in literary studies, I am interested in analyzing how journals indexed in the
same database do, and do not, engage similar and dissimilar keywords. I begin
with CL, which publishes scholarly articles and book
reviews. CL published the first articles on Thomas
Pynchon and Susan Howe and the first interviews with Margaret Drabble and Don
DeLillo; it also helped to introduce Kazuo Ishiguro, Eavan Boland, and J. M.
Coetzee to American readers. As of late, CL has also published
ecocritical and environmental humanist scholarship. The most recent volume in
the corpus includes articles that consider Black American conceptions of land
use , postapocalyptic environmental conditions in the novel Red Plenty, and a review of scholarship on
the Anthropocene and cultural production in the Global South .
In the
CL corpus, climate change as a keyword occurs
infrequently. At 10 occurrences in the top 50, no climate change or
environmental crisis clusters occur. Scaling the corpus down further by
selecting for five keyword occurrences in the top one hundred produces
ecocriticism and environmental crisis nodes quite distant from the network’s
center (Fig. 3). Each cluster numbers six occurrences, indicating their relative
insignificance in the corpus.
The occurrence of environmental crisis changes at subsequent scales. Selecting
for one keyword in the top five hundred, environmental crisis occurs six times
with eighteen links. Selecting for one keyword in the top seven
hundred-and-fifty, the occurrence count of environmental crisis remains the
same but adds new links. A cluster for climate change does not occur at any of
these scales. We must scale down considerably to find a cluster: selecting for
one keyword in the top one thousand registers a single occurrence of climate
change with four cluster links.
At first glance, these results corroborate the MLA International Bibliography’s
listing of
CL’s citations: only one article in the last
20 years has been indexed with climate change. At the
time of writing. This does not mean the corpus does not include
citations geared toward prominent environmental issues, as the environmental
crisis keyword surfaces when scaling down. The six citations indexed with
environmental crisis are not indexed with climate change, though they are
indexed with important topics such as global warming,pesticide,poisoning, and
violence. In the corpus, these citations include both reviews and articles . Because the environmental crisis cluster in the CL
corpus is attached to a constellation of topics, the corpus presents a
notable discursive gap between the use of environmental crisis and climate
change. If the latter is used seldomly, the former is used in reference to
important topics that may, or may not, be discussed separately from climate
change.
I now turn my attention to the
MFS corpus. MFS publishes articles and book reviews concerned with
twentieth- and twenty-first century literature on a quarterly basis, with an
emphasis on modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary fiction. A journal with a
prestigious publishing record of nearly 60 years, MFS is
a benchmark publication for innovative debates and topics in contemporary
literary studies. Of note to this article is the fact that MFS
has published multiple special issues concerned with climate change and
related environmental issues. These special issues include Modern Fiction and
the Ecological: The Futures of Ecocriticism, Anthropocene
Fictions, and Literature and Extraction; the
first special issue in that list published prominent environmental humanist Rob
Nixon’s early writing on slow violence.
Compared to the
CL corpus, the occurrence of climate
change as a keyword in the MFS corpus differs greatly.
The emergence of an environmental crisis node at the scale of 10 keyword
occurrences in the top 50 suggests the cluster’s relative significance. However,
no climate change cluster emerges. Scaling down to five keyword occurrences in
the top fifty and top one hundred returns the same result. Scaling the corpus
down to one keyword in the top five hundred produces a climate change cluster
with three occurrences and fourteen links to other keywords (Fig. 4). Several
clusters related to the environment occur at this scale, including ecology,ecocritical approach,environmental movement,natural gas industry,petroleum industry, and plant imagery.
Different keyword connections for climate change and environmental crisis
characterize their occurrence in the
MFS corpus. While
the former keyword primarily occurs around geopolitical clusters such as united
states imperialism and afghanistan war (2000-2021), the latter connects to
petroleum industry,nature, and ecocritical approach. While I do not mean
to focus on these two keywords throughout the essay, these distinctions are
worth noting, as many of the environmental crisis connections are relevant to
any literary studies account of climate change. Three citations appear that
explicitly address climate change ;
searching elsewhere in the corpus, citations with environmental crisis
represent a range of important but different environmental issues.
Databases such as the MLA International Bibliography operate with directed user
engagement, and the difference between keyword selection may elide opportunities
for accessible engagement. Regarding such engagement in the
MFS corpus, we can turn to Caroline Levine’s article The Long Lure
of Anti-Instrumentality: Politics, Aesthetics, and Sustainability as an example of disjunctions in keyword indexing. Levine’s article
asks readers to revise conceptions of literature’s anti-instrumentality in the
context of climate change’s emergence . Levine situates this argument
for literature’s instrumentality in the context of extant issues such as climate
migration, resource allocation, ecological degradation, and climate denialism
and pessimism , Levine’s article provokes new ways of thinking
about climate change and contemporary literary studies in scholarship and
pedagogy. In the MLA International Bibliography, Levine’s article is indexed
with three keywords: themes and figures; aesthetics; and left-wing
politics. At the time of writing. Climate change is absent from this list. Yet the term climate is used 18 times throughout the article, with 8 unique instances of climate change. In highlighting the indexing of Levine’s
article, I do not aim to criticize any party for the absence of climate change
as a keyword; we should still read, consider, and cite the article regardless of
how it is indexed. While reading
through journals may remain the best way to assess their scholarship, many
contemporary scholars instead rely on Googling, library search portal browsing,
and databases. Scholars’ targeted research practices help them get what they
need when they need it (especially when increased teaching loads and immensely
reduced funding opportunities undermine research capacities), and precise
keyword selection makes the difference. Yet the absence of climate change as a keyword impedes our
engagement with articles such as Levine’s that discuss it with significance.
My final test case, the
PMLA corpus — which is
significantly larger than either the CL or MFS corpora — publishes scholarship on a diverse range
of fields and periods in literary studies, including contemporary literature.
The journal’s active cultivation of novel approaches speaks to its importance,
not only as the cornerstone publication of the Modern Language Association but
also as a publication for established disciplinary conversations. As its website
states, The ideal PMLA essay exemplifies the best of its kind, whatever the
kind; addresses a significant problem; draws out clearly the implications of its
findings; and engages the attention of its audience through a concise, readable
presentation. PMLA is
also a competitive site for submission: disciplinary journals may therefore not
be as receptive to relatively new work, or even submissions from graduate
students and junior scholars . However, PMLA has published work relevant to contemporary literary studies,
the digital humanities , the environmental humanities,
and even an early iteration of digital environmental humanities referred to as the ecological digital
humanities, even as much of the journal’s writing
offers surveys of scholarship in their respective topics.
Starting with 10 keyword occurrences in the top 50, no environmental crisis or
climate change clusters emerge in the corpus. The notable absence of climate
change is still visible when we scale for at five keywords in the top fifty and
top one hundred. At each of these scales, zero clusters emerge for topics
associated with environmental issues. A cluster for climate change appears if
we select for one keyword occurrence in the top five hundred: the keyword occurs
six times and links with twenty-six additional clusters (Fig. 5).
Additional clusters associated with environmental issues emerge at this scale,
including nature,ecocriticism,landscape, and even anthropocene epoch.
In two unique citations, climate change is indexed with nature; in two other
citations, with weather (also seasons of the year in one of those two); in
another unique citation, with environmental studies; and, in a final unique
citation, pollution and industrialization. In the
PMLA corpus, then, climate change as a keyword enjoys
distinct cluster connections that speak to different yet interconnected topics.
For example, we have Philip Steer’s [2021] recent article on nineteenth-century
Britain, Australia, and the Anthropocene with climate change as a keyword.
Environmental crisis occurs as a keyword twice, and neither citation is
indexed with climate change or the above terms . Is
there a tradition of selecting environmental crisis in lieu of or as
complement to climate change in ISLE, CL, and MFS but not in PMLA? This difference may account for the concerns of field- or
period-based journals versus disciplinary journals. ISLE, CL, and MFS
publish scholarship with foci relevant to scholars; PMLA
publishes scholarship with a broad focus for multiple fields. Regardless of
their differences, each corpus presents different accounts of climate change
as a keyword.
Conclusion: Keywords and Digital Environmental Humanities
How fields such as contemporary literary studies and the digital humanities
respond to climate change requires shared conceptual keywords that extend beyond
disciplines. In the future, we may wish to derive inspiration for these terms
from various keyword projects . In addition, we may write a publicly
available keyword selection guide for precise database indexing and engagement:
Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio’s [2020] discussion of datasheets as a
contextual tool for big datasets may serve as first step toward realizing this
approach, encouraging what Johanna Drucker may refer to as a more sustainable
digital humanities praxis [2021]. In this case, I suggest a specific lexicon for
environmental issues and how they connect to climate change. Although some may
say that all humanities work is in some way imbricated in climate change , I argue that only humanities work that
explicitly addresses climate change should merit attention as climate humanities
scholarship. For instance, an essay that addresses topics such as climate-induced biodiversity shifts,
climate engineering, or climate fiction should be indexed with climate change
only if the essay makes a significant connection between said topics and climate
change. Such meaningful connections allow us to avoid the nebulousness of
environmental crisis, which does not offer as many interdisciplinary
inroads. This is not to overlook the fact that keyword indexing can be an
imperfect practice; however, I hope my results show that it can be standardized
for renowned publications interested in publishing on the topic.
A systematic adoption of keywords, as Williams writes, grants us a vocabulary to
use, to find our own ways in, to change as we find it necessary to change it, as
we go on making our own language and history. Whether one works in
contemporary literary studies or the digital humanities (or both), following
similarly determined examples of keyword selection will ensure continued
collective meaning making in scholarly discourse. Students, scholars, and
teachers interested in digital environmental humanities will also benefit from deliberate indexing choices.
As the digital environmental humanities take on new, forms, effective indexing practices that precisely frame
discussions of climate change in teaching, scholarship, and outward facing
projects will enrich the field’s interdisciplinary significance. At the same
time, because climate change is a phrase with meaning beyond academic
indexing, it can be a keyword that encompasses diverse yet globally
interconnected environmental issues; subsuming it within the environmental
crisis hierarchy only dilutes outward access to such scholarship.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Matt Hannah for feedback on the project in its many stages. My gratitude, as well, to the
DHQ reviewers for their suggestions.
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