Deep Mapping and Screen Tourism: The Oxford of Harry Potter and Inspector Morse

James Cateridge

doi:10.3390/h4030320

Abstract

This article proposes that the experiences of screen tourists in Oxford help to create a theoretical “deep map” of the city which explores place through narrative. Building on the travel writing of William Least Heat-Moon and other recent work in the spatial humanities, two case studies of major screen tourism drivers are considered and analyzed. The British television drama Inspector Morse (1987–2000) explores the ambiguity of Oxford intellectualism through its central character. Morse’s love of high culture, especially music, provides suggestive additional layers for multimedia mapping, which are realized online through user-adapted Google Maps and geolocated images posted on the Flickr service. Harry Potter fans may not be “pure” or independent screen tourists, but they provide a wealth of data on their interactions with filming locations via social media such as Instagram. This data provides emotional as well as factual evidence, and is accumulating into an ever richer and deeper digital map of human experience.

Highlights

As I sit writing this article in the hallowed halls of the Bodleian Library’s Radcliffe Camera reading room in the heart of Oxford, my immediate surroundings are hushed and quiet, filled with ancient books and students blinking in the light of laptop screens
Unlike Roberts’ example of Liverpool where movie maps arguably represent a “disembedding of place, identity and cultural memory” ([8], p. 201), I want to propose that screen tourists in Oxford use movie maps, guides and online cartography to enable a seductive fantasy of embodiment, a means to temporarily inhabit a fictional hero by entering their world
The many thousands of images of Harry Potter fans visiting Oxford locations which are publicly-available on Instagram tend to be rather more spontaneous and ad hoc in nature, but display a similar passion for embodiment within the cinematic universe

Summary

Introduction

As I sit writing this article in the hallowed halls of the Bodleian Library’s Radcliffe Camera reading room in the heart of Oxford, my immediate surroundings are hushed and quiet, filled with ancient books and students blinking in the light of laptop screens. The plethora of stories are mostly fictional—summaries of key episodes which draw attention to place over and above plot—but there are historical accounts of the city and its landmarks Such guides and the omnipresent “movie maps” produced by tourist boards are fascinating collisions between narrative and place, and yet they have received little attention from the growing critical literature on the phenomenon of screen tourism. 201), I want to propose that screen tourists in Oxford use movie maps, guides and online cartography to enable a seductive fantasy of embodiment, a means to temporarily inhabit a fictional hero by entering their world. This fantasy space is not quite the real Oxford, and it requires different tools to navigate. Heat-Moon’s book, but when considered as a conduit for historical information, social media can function as an enabler—or even an automatic generator—of deep maps, as I hope to demonstrate below

Inspector Morse: “Sophocles did it!”

Findings

Conclusions