Literary Mapping in the Digital Age

334 Pages·2016·15.233 MB·English

by  David Cooper, Christopher Donaldson, Patricia Murrieta-Flores

Literary Mapping in the
Digital Age
Drawing on the expertise of leading researchers from around the globe,
this pioneering collection of essays explores how geospatial technologies
are revolutionizing the discipline of literary studies. The book offers the
first intensive examination of digital literary cartography, a field whose
recent and rapid development has yet to be coherently analysed. This col-
lection not only provides an authoritative account of the current state of
the field, but also informs a new generation of digital humanities schol-
ars about the critical and creative potentials of digital literary mapping.
The book showcases the work of exemplary literary mapping projects
and provides the reader with an overview of the tools, techniques and
methods those projects employ.
David Cooper is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Manchester
Metropolitan University, UK.
Christopher Donaldson is Lecturer in Romanticism at the University of
Birmingham, UK.
Patricia Murrieta-Flores is Director of the Digital Humanities Research
Centre at the University of Chester, UK.
Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities
Series Editors: Marilyn Deegan, Lorna Hughes, Andrew
Prescott and Harold Short
Digital technologies are becoming increasingly important to arts and humanities
research, expanding the horizons of research methods in all aspects of data capture,
investigation, analysis, modelling, presentation and dissemination. This important
series will cover a wide range of disciplines with each volume focusing on a particu-
lar area, identifying the ways in which technology impacts on specific subjects. The
aim is to provide an authoritative reflection of the ‘state of the art’ in the applica-
tion of computing and technology. The series will be critical reading for experts in
digital humanities and technology issues, and it will also be of wide interest to all
scholars working in humanities and arts research.
Also in the series:
Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage
Erik Champion
Performing Digital: Multiple Perspectives on a Living Archive
David Carlin and Laurene Vaughan
Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage
Mia Ridge
Digital Archetypes: Adaptations of Early Temple Architecture
in South and Southeast Asia
Sambit Datta and David Beynon
Paradata and Transparency in Virtual Heritage
Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Hugh Denard and Drew Baker
Art Practice in a Digital Culture
Hazel Gardiner and Charlie Gere
Literary Mapping in the Digital Age
Edited by David Cooper, Christopher Donaldson and Patricia Murrieta-Flores
Forthcoming:
Digital Palaeography
Stewart Brookes, Malte Rehbein and Peter A. Stokes
Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media
Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Janelle Jenstad with Mark Kaethler
Historic Newspapers in the Digital Age
Paul Gooding
Literary Mapping in the
Digital Age
Edited by
David Cooper, Christopher Donaldson
and Patricia Murrieta-Flores
First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 selection and editorial matter, David Cooper, Christopher
Donaldson and Patricia Murrieta-Flores; individual chapters, the
contributors
The right of David Cooper, Christopher Donaldson and Patricia
Murrieta-Flores to be identified as the authors of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN: 9781472441300 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781315592596 (ebk)
Typeset in Baskerville
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of Figures viii
List of Plates xi
List of Tables xiii
List of Contributors xiv
Series Preface xvi
Acknowledgments xviii
Introduction: Rethinking Literary Mapping 1
DAVID COOPER, CHRISTOPHER DONALDSON AND
PATRICIA MURRIETA-FLORES
PART I
Mapping Methods: Systems, Approaches and Innovations 23
1 Mapping the Emotions of London in Fiction, 1700–1900:
A Crowdsourcing Experiment 25
RYAN HEUSER, MARK ALGEE-HEWITT, ANNALISE LOCKHART,
ERIK STEINER AND VAN TRAN
2 The Digital Poetics of Place-Names in Literary Edinburgh 47
MIRANDA ANDERSON AND JAMES LOXLEY
3 Geographical Text Analysis: Digital Cartographies of Lake
District Literature 67
IAN GREGORY AND CHRISTOPHER DONALDSON
4 Mapping Fiction: The Theories, Tools and Potentials
of Literary Cartography 88
BARBARA PIATTI
vi Contents
5 Bloomsday’s Big Data: GIS, Social Media and
James Joyce’s Ulysses 102
CHARLES TRAVIS
PART II
Mapping Practices: Places, Writers and Readers 123
6 Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Work 125
SALLY BUSHELL
7 The Spatial Practices of Writing: Arnold Bennett
and the Possibilities of Literary GIS 147
ANGHARAD SAUNDERS
8 Between ‘Distant’ and ‘Deep’ Digital Mapping: Walking
the Plotlines of Cardiff’s Literary Geographies 161
JON ANDERSON
9 The Cestrian Book of the Dead: A Necrogeographic Survey
of the Dee Estuary 182
LES ROBERTS
PART III
Mapping Futures: Collecting, Curating and Creating 205
10 Making the Invisible Visible: Place, Spatial Stories and
Deep Maps 207
DAVID J. BODENHAMER
11 From Mapping Text in Space to Experiencing Text in
Place: Exploring Literary Virtual Geographies 221
TREVOR M. HARRIS, H. FRANK LAFONE AND DAN BONENBERGER
12 Spatial Frames of Reference for Literature Through
Geospatial Technologies 240
GARY PRIESTNALL
Contents vii
13 Geovisuality: Literary Implications 258
TANIA ROSSETTO
14 ‘Setting the globe to spin’: Digital Mapping and
Contemporary Literary Culture 276
DAVID COOPER
Index 297
Figures
1.1 Geographic investment with London places in fiction.
Novels are divided by publication date into four half-
centuries. Size and shading of circles indicate the
frequency per million words with which the respective
place is estimated to appear in fiction. Values range from
about six times per million words (largest circles) to about
once per hundred million words (smallest circles). The
absence of a circle indicates that it never appeared in
fiction of the period. The grey region on the base map
approximates the extent of London’s visible urban density
on an historical map from the respective period (Rocque;
Horwood; Greenwood and Greenwood, ‘Ordnance Survey
Maps’). The polygon just northeast of the centre of the
River Thames is the City, outlined for geographic reference. 29
1.2 Likelihood of fictional setting per place, expressed as the
percentage of readers’ annotations indicating a place was
the setting of its passage. Fictional setting also gravitates
around the West End (cf. Figure 1.1), though in the
nineteenth century it extends to several outlying villages
and suburbs, probably given the development of the railways. 33
1.3 Odds ratio network built from Table 1.1 and Table 1.2,
showing the odds ratios between factors of passages
(emotion and setting) and factors of places (location,
type, class and era). If two factors are linked, they are
significantly more likely to occur together than not (odds
ratio > 1.4). 42
2.1 Palimpsest prototype screenshot of satellite version of the
map; each pink shape demarcates a text’s range on the map. 50
2.2 Palimpsest prototype screenshot with example of excerpt
from The Heart of Midlothian. 51
3.1 The major geographical features of the Lakeland region. 68
3.2 A dot-map of place-name instances taken from the Lake
District corpus; only the area around the Lake District is shown. 71
Figures ix
3.3 A density-smoothed distribution of place-names in the Lake
District corpus; a z-score of 0 is the mean density of the
dataset, 1.0 is one standard deviation above the mean, and
1.96 and 2.58 are expected to represent 5% and 1% of the
values (two-tailed) in the dataset. 72
3.4 Place-name instances that collocate with awful. 78
3.5 Place-name instances that collocate with steep. 80
3.6 Spatial scan statistic of place-name instances that collocate
with awful; the symbols representing hot spots show all of
the place-names from the corpus that lie within the cluster
regardless of whether or not they collocate with awful.
Instances of awful are shown as smaller grey dots. The
density smoothed surface, taken from Figure 3.3, is also shown. 82
3.7 Spatial scan statistic of place-name instances that collocate
with steep. 82
3.8 A Digital Terrain Model of the Lake District with awful
place-name collocations; the coast line and the DTM do
not match up completely because of differences in tidal
definitions. 84
3.9 The heights of the instances of (1) awful and (2) steep
instances compared to all instances in the corpus; ‘cluster’
refers to instances occurring within a cluster identified
by Kulldorf’s scan statistic. Positive clusters are hotspots,
negative are coldspots. There are no coldspots for awful. 85
4.1 Extract of the online template for the data entry in A
Literary Atlas of Europe with drawing tools and various
options to record additional attributes. 92
4.2 Extract from the scenario for A Literary Atlas of Europe,
historical map of Prague with magnifying glass (left) and
mapping result for Paul Leppins’ ‘Gespenst der Judenstadt’
(right). Design: Anne-Christine Krämer. 97
4.3 Literary gravity centres and peaks around Lake Lucerne
1800–2006 with Lucerne in the upper right corner and
Saint Gotthard (pass and tunnel systems) in the lower right
corner. Textual analysis: Barbara Piatti; Map Design: Hans
Rudolf Bär. 98
5.1 Fragment of the Carlo Linati Schema (1920) and section of
Ulysses GIS map geo-database sourced from the Carlo Linati
Schema; coordinates of latitude and longitude represented
as decimal degrees. 108
5.2 Google Fusion Map visualisation of the geo-database
sourced from the Linati Schema. 109
5.3 Bloomsday Social Media Concentrations: Davy Byrnes Pub
and Joyce’s Martello Tower. 113
5.4 Tweetflickrtubing Bloomsday in the twenty-first century:
Funny Hats, Starbucks and Davy Byrne Pub Drinkers. 113