Unraveling Seaspace: Decoding Environmental Knowledge in a Classical Malay Literary Corpus

This study approaches Classical Malay literature from an environmental perspective, focusing on diverging contexts and meanings across different spatial categories in the portrayal of the sea. Our primary data source was the Classical Malay literary corpus of the Malay Concordance Project. By employing a mixed-methods approach, combining distant reading techniques with thorough close reading, we were able to analyze a more extensive selection of texts compared to previous studies. As a result of this approach, we introduce three nuanced seaspaces, each symbolizing distinct spatial dimensions of the sea and connected to different symbols, contexts, and motifs. These seaspaces encompass (1) the sea’s mystic underwaters, (2) its human-centered shore, and (3) its connective midst. Through these seaspaces, we aim to demonstrate the sea’s wide range of meanings in Classical Malay literature, all of which are rooted in its heterogenous and multidimensional space. We consider these seaspaces to represent maritime environmental knowledge encoded and concealed in the large body of Malay literature which this study attempts to decode.