Mapping Narratives: The Spatiotemporal in Digital Literary Cartographies

Leah Thomas

This presentation will provide a working definition of digital literary cartographies and discuss how these cartographies present spatiotemporal elements of literary narratives. I will explore examples of successful projects such as The Grub Street Project and the Early Modern Map of London that map literary narratives and examine what these projects reveal about these narratives. I will highlight my own digital literary cartography using Mary Prince's slave narrative The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831). I define this work also as a literary text because of its use of sensibility popular in contemporaneous novels. Additionally, including this work demonstrates literary and historical intersections. This project will incorporate digital images of contemporaneous maps to contextualize the geographic imagination. Comparing this project to existent digital literary cartographies will illumine the spatiotemporal mapping of literary texts.

NACIS 2014

Transcript

1. { Mapping Narratives: The Spatiotemporal in Digital Literary Cartographies Leah Thomas, PhD Assistant Professor of English Dept. of Languages & Literature Virginia State University NACIS 2014
2. The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) University of Victoria The Agas Map 1561, mod. 1633 Attributed to Ralph Agas
3. { { Section C6 Thames Street MoEML http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/
4. The Grub Street Project University of Saskatchewan Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad (1728-9) A New Plan of the City of London, Westminster, and Southwark London, 1720 By John Strype http://grubstreetproject.net/
5. The Orlando Project University of Alberta http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/orlando/
6. The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Related by Herself (1831)
7. A New & Accurate Map of Bermudas or Sommer’s Islands, taken from an Actual Survey London, 1752 By Emmanuel Bowen 35 x 22 cm Library of Congress Geography and Map Division
8. Turks Islands, from a Survey made in 1753 London, 1775 By Thomas Jefferys 45 x 30 cm American Geographical Society Library
9. Turks Island
10. Antigua, Surveyed by Robert Baker, Surveryor General of that Island, Engraved and Improved by Thomas Jefferys London, 1775 45 x 60 cm Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library
11. A General Chart of the West Indies London, 1796 By Joseph Smith Speer 71 x 117 cm Library of Congress Geography and Map Division
12. { Senate House University of London Russell Square, London England Freedom