The members of our Map History Reading Group have returned to our respective corners to think about what sort of GIS-based research we might do following our upcoming ATLAS training. I have been considering how I might employ GIS to map the Victorian fantastic, perhaps its regional characters. I have some question that won’t phrase itself about why that relationship might matter.
Which, as it turns out, is why I was struck by a Chronicle of Higher Education article on “Literary Geospaces” (8/1/08) that discusses two literature-related mapping projects that are well advanced (both were featured in a panel at last year’s December MLA Conference): Janelle Jenstad’s Map of Early Modern London and Matthew L. Jockers’s work on mapping or “georeferencing” the development of Irish-American literature. Although the article forswears the novelty of the digital humanities, and especially its secondary-stage applications such as GIS (too soon, far too soon), it’s worth a quick read for an introduction to “cultural geography,” in which we track and trace social and cognitive landscapes.
Will this new quantitative method of study lead to the new kind of reading that University of Nebraska digital humanist Stephen Ramsay supposes? Careful students of literature have long made spatial diagrams as well as temporal charts as they’ve read; we’ve been known to trace fictional and biographical journeys across maps of corresponding, actual terrains, too. That we can now add to these old methods much increased complexity and enhanced themes may indeed lead us to new insights. Whether that means a new way of reading (which I take to be theoretical rather than methodological), I doubt. Yet, I am eager to see this spectacle performed upon the disciplinary stage and to do some of the dancing across its glinting row of pinheads myself.
Kelly Searsmith
