No source: created in electronic format.
This paper examines the spatiality of three contemporary literary narratives
using a digital humanities approach. By this I mean a few things: firstly, I
regard spatiality as a complex and dynamic historical dimension on par with
temporality, and not just as a static, passive container in which events
independently transpire. Secondly, I am interested in examining not only space
and place as represented in texts, but also the spatiality of the texts
themselves, i.e., the materiality of language. Thirdly, I have built the Litmap digital mapping platform (http://barbarahui.net/litmap) for the purpose of visualizing space
and place in/of texts, which I use in conjunction with traditional close reading
methods in order to carry out my scholarship.
The definition of spatiality I employ follows from arguments made by spatial
theorists including Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Edward Said and
Edward Soja, who push for an understanding of space and place as
socio-historically produced rather than somehow existing a
priori. I argue further that networked spatiality is a prevalent trope,
organizing principle, and way of understanding the world in contemporary texts.
I show how this presents itself in the narratives I examine (in quite a
different way in all three) and is a particularly useful, even crucial inroad
into understanding them. My assertion is that the three texts at hand can be
characterized as displaying three kinds of topographical networks: Rings of Saturn (1997),
geographical places are connected to each other via a historical network
of events, and the nodes of the network are primarily man-made
architectural structures.Seltsame Sterne starren
zur Erde (2008), geographical places are connected to one
another via the transnational migrations of people, and the nodes of the
network are these moving embodied subjects themselves. Raw Shark Texts (2007),
language, thought, and memory are material and have spatial dimensions.
Places are connected to each other via these material traces, and the
nodes of the network, which are constituted by human subjects and their
linguistic traces, are ephemeral and unstable, with “un-space” figuring
as an otherworldly yet very real dimension in the narrative’s spatial
imaginary. In addition, the text of Raw Shark Texts itself is figured as
a material body of language and textual image, with patterned
connections running throughout the book.
Both the core observations listed above and the sub-arguments presented in the
thesis were arrived at via a combination of Litmap-based
and traditional print-based research methodologies. The current Litmap interface displays a map image of the Earth, with
place names and corresponding information from each text keyed to that
location’s coordinates on the map. In the case of Rings of
Saturn, this allows for a fairly complex mapping since the nodes of the
network in that narrative correspond to unambiguous geographical place names and
locations. In the case of Özdamar’s and Hall’s texts, however, this becomes
increasingly challenging as space and place become more subjective and fluid,
requiring new and creative ways of visualizing data. The use of digital media to
map literature is thus useful both for revealing what it can and can’t do, and I
argue it is important to recognize both the strengths and constraints of the
medium as we continue exploring this new area of research.
Moving forward, I plan to develop and extend the Litmap
platform both in order to better address the crucial issues of how to visualize
ambiguous data, and also to improve upon the existing functionality for
searching, filtering, and browsing. The database underlying the current system
is flexible and extensible enough to accommodate information from far more
narratives, and I intend to enable users to upload other books for teaching and
research. Once a large corpora of texts is uploaded, this will open up the
ability to search across time and space and do other macro analyses of
literature. Perhaps most of all, however, I look forward to making Litmap a truly collaborative project. My hope is to
assemble a team of colleagues who will be invested in working together on
creative technical and design solutions for the platform.