Apologies for cross-postings
Centre for e-Research Seminar: Between the real and the imaginary: Using
digital mapping in literary studies
Anouk Lang, University of Strathclyde
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/groups/cerch/research/seminars/2012-13/between.aspx
Tuesday 27th November 2012, 18:15
Anatomy Museum, Strand Campus, King's College London (directions:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/cultural/atm/location.aspx)
Literary critics are used to grappling with the confrontation between
the real and the representational, but applying geospatial technologies
to literary texts brings out a host of fresh challenges to contend with
while probing the relationship between imagined space and cartographic
space. In this paper, I explore how a number of digital mapping tools –
ArcGIS, QGIS, Google Earth and the SIMILE project’s Exhibit tool – can
illuminate the work of twentieth-century authors who engaged with
modernist culture from positions outside the main Anglo-American and
European centres of political and cultural power. These tools not only
add help scholars to identify patterns that may not be easily
discernible using the tools of conventional literary analysis, but also
allow them to specify the ways in which a text’s treatment of place
bears on wider questions such as canonicity, influence and cultural
nationalism. The Maori writer Witi Ihimaera, for instance, pays homage
to the celebrated short stories of his New Zealand literary progenitor
Katherine Mansfield, while simultaneously repositioning them,
introducing Maori perspectives and places in ways that disrupt the
eurocentric nature of Mansfield’s texts. In different ways, the two
authors are both concerned with the dialectic between modernity and
tradition, a distinction that maps – both geographically and
conceptually – onto different kinds of space, and that sets the urban
against the rural, and the colonial against the metropolitan. Using
geospatial technologies to map the locations in the work of these and
other authors can provide a much more precise indication of how they
deploy geography as a symbolic resource, which can in turn generate
insights into where, and how, non-European cultures and perspectives can
be excavated from the canonical texts of high modernism.
The seminar will be followed by refreshments.
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Dr. Stuart Dunn
Lecturer
Centre for e-Research
Department of Digital Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London, WC2B 5RL
Tel. +44 20 7848 2709
Fax. +44 20 7848 2980
www.stuartdunn.wordpress.com
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