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This book presents a series of case studies related to the creation of humanities GIS models that blend tropes from literary, cultural, and historical studies. Reconceptualizing GIS by offering these types of ontological translations will hopefully foster epistemological marriages between qualitative and quantitative (or mixed-method) approaches; provide a means to visualize literary interactions with place and space, as well as critical theory; and creatively engage technological applications relevant to the digital humanities. The models used essentially implement selected GIS applications from my PhD dissertation on the “lifeworlds,” or literary geographies, of 1930s Ireland and a GIS database-mapping project on seventeenth-century Irish land transfers as a postdoctoral fellow in the digital humanities.²⁴ Using GIS in this new way, I discovered that I enjoyed the process of mapping and gained insight from the experience—which brings to mind the aphorism that it is the journey, not the destination, that counts. I hope this book will inspire readers to undertake their own journeys in humanities GIS as well.

Part 1, “GIS and the digital humanities,” continues with chapter 2, a brief history of Western geographical thought and post-structuralist theory in relation to the conceptualization of GIS approaches for the humanities. It ends with chapter 3, which presents a historical GIS case study of seventeenth-century Ireland that illustrates how three-dimensional (3D) geovisualization and database-mapping techniques helped me to analyze the redistribution of confiscated land following the 1641 Rebellion and Oliver Cromwell’s 1649–50 conquest of Ireland.

Part 2, “Writers, texts, and mapping,” focuses on GIS applications in literary and cultural studies. This section draws on the critical, aesthetic, and spatial thought of Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Giambattista Vico, and the poet Dante. Chapter 4 draws on digital fieldwork to chronotopically plot the rural and urban landscapes experienced and perceived by the writer Patrick Kavanagh. This chapter chronicles how his relocation from the country to the city influenced the contrasting topophilic and topophobic depictions of his native Inniskeen Parish in his 1938 novel The Green Fool and 1942 epic poem The Great Hunger. Chapter 5 uses GIS to deformatively and ergodically reconstruct James Joyce’s Ulysses and illustrate how the spatial influence of the medieval Italian poet Dante, in the words of poet Ezra Pound, inspired Joyce to launch a “new Inferno in full sail.”²⁵ Joyce employed cartographical and artistic methods of the Cubists and Italian Futurists (among others) to plot his masterwork, so this chapter considers what may have been further accomplished had he access to current GIS tools.

Through the prism of GIS, chapter 6 explores the psychogeographies of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and the historical cycles and poetics of Giambattista Vico and Mikhail Bakhtin to conduct Situationist International–inspired urban field surveys of modernist literature. Part 2 concludes with chapter 7, which discusses an open source–enabled GIS timeline created to perform an ergodic, digital bricolage that maps the writer Samuel Beckett’s early life in Dublin, London, and France between 1916 and 1945.

Part 3, “Toward a humanities GIS,” features chapter 8, which argues for rebooting GIS so that we may begin to engage the concepts and tools of the humanities. This book focuses largely on modeling GIS practices inspired by the humanities, which are currently pioneered by a coterie of scholars from across the academic spectrum and very much open to further exploration and development.

Sources

1 P. Booker and A. Thacker, Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 1.

2 D. J. Staley, “Finding Narratives of Time and Space,” in Understanding Place: GIS and Mapping across the Curriculum, eds. D. S. Sinton and J. J. Lund (Redlands: Esri Press, 2007), 36.

3 M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988), 121.

4 T. M. Barnes, J. Corrigan, and D. J. Bodenhamer, eds., The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), 174.

5 P. Merriman et al., “Space and Spatiality in Theory,” Dialogues in Human Geography, 2, no. 1 (2012): 19; for a further discussion of “qualculativeness,” please see N. Thrift, “Movement-Space: The Changing Domain of Thinking Resulting from the Development of New Kinds of Spatial Awareness,” Economy and Society, 33, no. 4 (2004): 582–604.

6 J. E. Dobson, Reply to comments on “Automated Geography,” in The Professional Geographer, 35 (1983): 351.

7 D. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 151.

8 Ibid., 181.

9 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 23.

10 Ibid., 142.

11 Aitken and Craine, “Affective Geographies and GIScience,” 141.

12 F. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998); Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory (London: Verso, 2005); B. Piatti,Die Geographie der Literatur: Schauplätze, Handlungsräume, Raumphantasien (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2008); (Ein Literarischer Atlas Europas [Literary Atlas of Europe][http://www.literaturatlas.eu/en/]).

13 B. Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Space, trans. R. T. Tally, Jr. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011); R. T. Tally, Jr., Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).

14 Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship, eds. A. K. Knowles and A.Hiller (Redlands, CA: Esri Press, 2008); The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship, eds. D. J. Bodenhamer, J. Corrigan, and T. Harris (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); and GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place, ed. M. Dear et al. (New York: Routledge, 2011).

15 Staley, “Finding Narratives of Time and Space,” 45.

16 Ibid.

17 M. Sample, “Notes towards a Deformed Humanities,” Sample Reality (blog), May 2, 2012, http://www.samplereality.com/2012/05/02/notes-towards-a-deformed-humanities/.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 J. McGann and L. Samuels, “Deformance and Interpretation,” New Literary History, 30, no. 1, “Poetry & Poetics” (Winter, 1999): 25–56.

21 A. Mactavish and G. Rockwell, “Multimedia Education in the Arts and Humanities,” Mind Technologies: Humanities Computing and the Canadian Academic Community, eds. R. Siemens and D. Moorman (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006).

22 A. Liu, “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. M. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/20.

23 L. Manovich, “How to Follow Global Digital Cultures, or Cultural Analytics for Beginners,” in Deep Search: The Politics of Search beyond Google, eds. F. Stalder and K. Becker (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers 2009).

24 C. Travis, Lifeworlds: Literary Geographies in 1930s Ireland (Dublin: Trinity College Dublin, 2006).

25 Ezra Pound, letter to Homer Pound dated April 20, 1921, in Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound’s Essay on Joyce, ed. F. Read, (New York: New Directions, 1967), 189.