Digital Literary Mapping: II. Towards an Integrated Visual–Verbal Method for the Humanities

This is the second of two linked articles that aim to present new ways of mapping literature by means of digital tools for the twenty-first century. The preceding article articulated the need to move beyond the mapping of literary texts onto geographic sites in the world and into the mapping of space relationally in nonreferential ways by means of literary topology. This second article seeks to make a larger case for new ways of working in the digital humanities and suggests that new methods of analysis and new tools are needed. It articulates an integrated visual–verbal method of interpretation that combines the close reading of spatial meanings and structures within a text with analysis of the map series generated out of that same text in an iterative structure. It also argues for the value of layers of mapping and of comparative mapping of the same place both referentially and nonreferentially. The literary texts chosen to exemplify the method are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. These allow us to explore the validity of the claims mad