In Which a Theme is Revealed

Reading Graphs, Maps, Trees at this particular time was a strange and wonderful experience. This was, first and foremost, because it’s a provocative and earnest book, and there’s nothing I love more than scholars who respond earnestly to their chosen fields. I’ve never been one for sustaining a hip, detached façade. Also, though, there were strange overlaps between the examples used in the three sections and work I’ve done in the last year. In a class on Digital Archiving and Editions here at the University of Nebraska, I worked with a partner on mapping several of Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes adventures. The project was a joy because I was working with texts that I have loved reading and rereading, but also because of what it taught me about the power of visualization.

Doyle’s stories are full of places—readers are taken both in and out of buildings in greater London, but also in and out of neighborhoods, suburbs…they are, like most adventure stories, meant to be seen by readers. However, one cannot just look at a map of modern London and understand Doyle’s London. Where do these characters live? Where do they live in relation to one another? To landmarks? What types of places does Doyle take us to? Being able to represent the answers to these questions is not only a helpful aid to the casual reader, but also can open up new lines of scholarly inquiry. There are details that cannot be gleaned from texts without some added manipulation. As Moretti says:

…you reduce the text to a few elements, and abstract them from the narrative flow, and construct a new, artificial object like the maps….And with a little luck, these maps will be more than the sum of their parts: they will possess ‘emerging’ qualities, which were not visible at the lower level. (53)

Visualizations of literature—graphs, maps, trees, sine waves, word maps—all allow for a revision opportunity that other research tools cannot recreate. Simply put, visualizations show us a different version of the text in question than close reading, or deconstruction, or Marxist critiques, or any other interpretive lens. And why should we not think about space when we think about literature? I remember, for instance, realizing the crucial connection between the social class of Doyle’s minor characters and their relative distances from the epicenter of London—and how these distances were allowed by the rapid development of rail travel. Without going through the act of mapping out the stories, it’s a set of connections I would have missed. Perhaps those who possess not only a knowledge of late 19^th-century British literature but also social history and technology would not have needed an impetus for realization, but, for the rest of us…

            There’s something very tactile about the process of creating a visualization that seems not to occur in traditional literary scholarship. Perhaps this comes from the adaptation from one medium to another; whatever the cause, I appreciate the slowing down that it requires of me. The actions are less familiar; the “abstracting” that Moretti writes about seems to work, for me, like taking a familiar painting and holding it upside down before viewing it again—it beats my brain’s familiar routes for just long enough to make space for something new.

            One of the aspects of Moretti’s discussion I particularly appreciate is that of the interdependence of interpretive strategies and tools. Just as a text can perhaps become more than the sum of its parts with the addition of a visualization, a visualization without a text would lack—I think—a crucial foundational basis. Again—and, at this point, I’m willing to call this “the theme of the semester”—what it seems to come down to is the value of a combination of approaches. When we as scholars are willing to incorporate new strategies, our research will undoubtedly benefit, either because our new approach will reveal an undiscovered facet, or because attempting something new will reveal to us something unknown about our previous approach.