Few periods in history can match how fast and consequential the transformation of turn-of-the-century Europe was. With military escalation on the continent, the increasingly ruthless scramble for Africa, and the pioneering of 'geopolitics' as a theoretical concept - geography played a key role in the political thinking of the time. The project aims to map out, analyze, and compare British and Swedish geographical references in the major Swedish newspapers. Outlining the 'mental maps' of the period, the project will answer what places were common knowledge? Which were idealized? Demonized? Most often employed to make or illustrate a point? The study combines quantitative, distant readings of digitized newspapers articels with qualitative, close readings of the key speeches and debates. It employs machine learning through the Swedish BERT-model from the National Library, which performs well at a range of AI tasks. As such, the project is designed to further methodological innovation and machine-learning expertice within Swedish humanities. These methods have not been applied in this way before and a year of funding could make a decisive difference in making possible establishing a methodological practice.