Litmap: Networked Narratives

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/lit
map
) 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:
-
In W.G. Sebald’s
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.
-
In Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s
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.
-
In Steven Hall’s
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

2
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.
References
Hall, Steven
(2007).
The Raw Shark Texts.
New York: Canongate.
Özdamar, Emine Sevgi
(2008).
Seltsame
Sterne starren zur Erde: Wedding - Pankow
1976/77 2003.
Köln: Kiepenhauer & Witsch.
Sebald, W.G.
(1998).
The Rings of Saturn: An
English Pilgrimage.
Hulse, Michael (ed.). New
York: New Directions Books.