While talking with my dad about his recent trip I realized a third axis in my analysis of his words. The landscape itself can be viewed as an active, dynamic participant.
In my model the landscape includes weather and other actively changing variables like rushing water, rolling hills or blowing gusts of wind.
An observer can view themselves part of a landscape, can see the landscape as absolute or relative and as a dynamic, active actor or a static picture/environment.
Words that show an active landscape talk about the earth and rocks as moving, describe a changing (weather) environment, and showcase a differnce between a present, past and/or future.
In Hiking Guide books there is a certain way of talking about the landscape. Generally the landscape is written up in a few different aspects, often in a similar sequence, from big to small.
-Geography
-Geology and Geological History
-Flora and Fauna
-Cultural History
-Local customs, transport, food and drink etc.
Where guidebooks fall on the spectra can be divided in two. First there is the overview of the route and landscape, second there is the description of the route itself.
The overview is fairly centered in all regards but leans in the following directions:
-more dynamic then static
-centered inbetween absolute and relative, depending on the paragraph
-far more passive then active
Here I have devised a simple graph to showcase the categorisation I have thought up after reading: Mark, D. M., Turk, A. G., Burenhult, N. and Stea, D. (eds.) (2011) Landscape in Language: Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Benjamins.
The two axes show the spectrum of an active to passive observer of a landscape and their view of the landscape as relative or absolute respectively.
An active observer views themselves as a necessary part of the landscape, as opposed to a passive viewer.
An absolute landscape is one which is detatched from the observer as a distant backdrop, in contrast to a relative landscape in which an observer is surrounded by the environment.
For my first experiment I asked participants to describe the above picture in detail. I followed by mapping their descriptions on my graph.