Digital mapping of fictional places in Spanish Early Modern Byzantine novels

Conference: Mapping the Text · New York University · 2018

Contents

• Title
• 1) Theoretical framework (3)
• 2) Literary mapping↡(4-7)
• 3) Methodological framework↡(8-13)
• 4) Quantitative map visualization↡(14-23)
• 5) Visualization of itineraries↡(24-29)
• 6) Final remarks (30)
• References
• Impressum

2) Literary mapping

"the knowledge of GEOGRAPHY is, which, in that respect therefore is of ∫ome, and not without iu∫t cau∫e called The eye of Hi∫tory [...] the reading of Hi∫tories doeth both ∫eeme to be much more plea∫ant, and in deed ∫o it is, when the Mappe being layed before our eyes, we may behold things done, or places where they were done, as if they were at this time pre∫ent and in doing." (Ortelius, The theatre of the vvhole world, London, 1606: 4v)

“For the courtiers do not stir from their rooms or beyond the threshold of their court, but travel over the whole world merely by looking at a map, without a farthing's cost or suffering heat or cold, hunger, or thirst.” (Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1615, 2, VI)

Literary maps by cartographers

Vtopiae typus. [...] Descriptione D. Thomas Mori, Delineatione Abrahami Ortelij · wikimedia

Map of Don Quixote's adventures in a Quijote edition, by the geographer Tomás López, 1780 © BNE

Digital literary mapping

• · Mapping St Petersburg. Experiments in Literary Cartography (fictional)
• · Mapping Dante. A Study of Places in the Commedia (fictional)
• · Authorial London. The city in the lives and works of its Writers (corpus & fictional)
• · ToposText (historical & fictional)
• · Ein literarischer Atlas Europa (fictional)
• · Mapping Lake District Literature (historical & fictional)
• · NYWalker: geocoding the contents of novels (fictional)
• · Fabula and Sjužet in “Wandering Rocks” (fictional)

• creation of post-authorial maps (Bushell 2012: 152)
• analytical potentiality (+)
• as a critical component of a DSE (+)

Byzantine literary genre in Spain (XVI-XVII)

• Chronotope: sea travels, pirates, exoticism.
• "Kartographisches Schreiben"Dünne 2011: 61-66

(Historical cartography as narrative model)

• Carta Marina (Persiles), Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Semprilis).
• North-South axis vs. Mediterranean basin.

3) Methodological framework

• Answers & new questions.
• Possibilities of digital mapping.

Corpus (proof of concept): 5 novels

Location extraction

• Stanford NER
· version 3.8.0
· language models 2017/09/06 (Spanish, English)
• FreeLing
· version 4.0
· performance with (old) Spanish (+)
• Apache OpenNLP
· for the R package, models for 1.5 series
· performance with Spanish (-)

Geolocation

3 gazzetters via APIs infrastructure

• Pelagios/Peripleo (ancient places)
• Geonames (general)
• Geonames (Wikipedia)

Geolocation R package: "editio/georeference" (forked from ggmap)

Georeference and tiling of historical maps (QGIS)

Digital Mapping (Leaflet for R)

• JavaScript library for interactive maps.
• one environment for data & visualization.
• overlay historic maps.
• export capabilities (interactive html).

4) Map visualization

· in clusters

place cluster of five novels

coverage: cluster's bounds in «Persiles» (red)

coverage: cluster's bounds in «Aethiopica» (grey)

coverage: cluster's bounds in «Semprilis» (green)

· places by frequency

most frequent places

· places clustered by proximity

place density in «Semprilis» (heat map)

shared places between novels (grouped by number)

methodological issues 1/2

• Fiction in real places?

"Recent applications of the ‘spatial turn’ in literary studies naively presuppose the mappability of literature, reducing fiction to ‘invented events in real places." (Stockhammer, 2013: 123)

• One type of fictional place?

historical, invented, indirect reference, mix of real and fictional, displaced, fantastic, explicitly imprecise, etc (Reuschel/Hurni, 2011)

• Zones of narrative action?

  remembered, dreamed places, digresions, diegesis, etc. (Piatti, 2008)

• Only place names as spatial feature?

technical issues 2/2

• Inaccurate NER (Bornet/Kaplan, 2017).
• Limits of automated geolocation by gazetteers.
• Place disambiguation (manual).
• Uncontrolled clustering method.

Gazetteers automated returns

5) Visualization of itineraries

Itinerary and stops of the lovers (Semprilis and Genorodano).

literarische Kartizität

"Affinität oder Distanz zu kartographischen Darstellungsverfahren" (Stockhamer, 2007: 68)

(affinity or distance to cartographic visualization techniques)

Historical map overlay (digitized and georeferenced)

Inset: "Congi Regni Christiani, in Africa, nova descriptio."

overlay: Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (circa 1619)