Cartographic and Literary Intersections: Digital Literary Cartographies, Digital Humanities, and Libraries and Archives

Abstract

Digital literary cartography projects can provide dynamic interactive experiences with prose narrative, poetry, and other literary forms. Recently, literary studies have begun to incorporate maps to reveal the geographic imagination at play in literature. As metaphor, maps furnish a conceptual model to understand literary texts through characters’ proximity to each other and events and relationships between “fictional” and “real” places. The transition to digital historical maps and digital literary cartography projects continues to inform the intersection of cartographic and literary studies in that such maps and projects incorporate labels and layers to identify social and cultural contexts. Finally, these maps and projects involve users’ imaginations to read maps as narratives through the map as metaphor. Cognitive mapping, implicit in this relationship, connects cartography and literature to inform spatial and perceptual conceptions. Libraries and archives contribute to digital humanities and digital literary cartographies through digitization, preservation, and metadata of digital historical maps. Scholars, librarians, and archivists can collaborate to contribute metadata for cartographic and literary materials to create digital literary cartographies within online public access catalogs (OPACs) and digital object management systems.