Читать книгу Abstract Machine - Charles B. Travis - Страница 12

Scholars in the humanities have explored the relationship between geography and literature from cartographical and theoretical perspectives. Key examples range from Franco Morretti’s (1998, 2005) schematic and Marxist geometrical approaches to literary studies to Barbara Piatti’s ongoing project to map the fictional and actual locations of literary works.¹² Bertrand Westphal’s “geocritical” approach explores the overlapping territories of physical geography, cognitive mapping, and literature by plotting the geometric and philosophical coordinates of real and fictional space through the conceptual lenses of spatiotemporality, transgressivity, and referentiality.¹³ At the same time, a number of edited volumes have helped to further engage GIS in the humanities in both practical and theoretical ways and deepen the perceived connections between cartography, theory, and literature.¹⁴

Building on these works, I have created humanities GIS models that combine and perform ergodic and deformative readings of Irish literary, cultural, and historical texts. Staley notes that in a typical written narrative, elements of a story operate in a linear pattern, with a beginning, middle, and an end. A spatial narrative can have a linear pattern (as in tour-style maps), but other forms of meaningful patterns can unfold in two or more dimensions. By departing from classic Aristotelian linear narrative, ergodic approaches in GIS—those that require work from an author-reader—can model complex spatial relationships between the author’s construction of a text, the tabulation of archival data, and a viewer’s choices.¹⁵ This type of storytelling in GIS provides an interactive platform from which to synchronize layers of images, words, numbers, and vectors into simultaneous and multidimensional narratives.¹⁶

In contrast to ergodicity, deformance is a literary-criticism technique developed in the digital humanities as a key methodology for textual analysis and data mining.¹⁷ The approach combines two words,performance and deform, to construct an interpretative concept premised on deliberately misreading a text—for example, reading a poem backward line by line.¹⁸ In Reading Machines (2011), Stephen Ramsay notes that computers enable scholars to practice deformance quite easily—to take apart an epic poem, for example, by focusing only on its nouns or by calculating the frequency of collocations between character names in a novel.¹⁹ Chapters 5, 6, and 7 of this book specifically test GIS-framed, deformative mapping models of the texts and biographies of three authors. Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels contend that this interpretative technique applies scientia to poiesis to elucidate the relationship between two discourse forms. Furthermore, they argue, this method seeks to explain a unitary and unique phenomenon, rather than establish a set of general rules or laws.²⁰

In addition to the application of ergodic and deformative techniques, this book situates humanities GIS in the fields of multimedia art, design, and culture. Here, according to Andrew Mactavish and Geoffrey Rockwell, humanities computing falls in league with the visual and performing arts by legitimizing technological practice and the creation of non-textual scholarly artifacts.²¹ The use of GIS in this context illustrates Alan Liu’s point: beyond acting in an instrumental role, the digital humanities broaden the very idea of instrumentalism, technological and otherwise.²² Lev Manovich predicts that the systematic use of large-scale computational analysis and interactive visualization of cultural patterns (made possible with GIS) will grow into a major trend in cultural criticism and the culture industries in the coming decades. Manovich asks: “What will happen when humanists start using interactive visualizations as a standard tool in their work, the way many scientists do already?”²³