Not as quantified and far more whimsical than Moretti’s maps, the drawings created by Andrew DeGraff (who’s described as a ‘pop cartographer’) cover a so-called atlas of literary maps. Check them out here, along with a time lapse video of his creative process. As he is quoted in the article, “These are maps for people who seek to travel beyond the lives and places they already know (or think they know). The goal here isn’t to become found, but only to become more lost.” I don’t know that Moretti would think his maps were that useful, and I don’t imagine that they would qualify as a DH project, but I bet DeGraff discovered these texts in new ways in the process of creating these visualizations. At the very least, he probably had to do some close reading.
This is really neat. It may not look like a typical DH project, but in some ways it is – maybe a cross between DH and psychology. They are maps of the imaginative spaces people create in process of reading a book, especially one that has a distinct spatial or geographical component in the narrative. I think this could apply to projects about reading and narrative theory, psychoanalytic theory (as used in literary criticism), and investigations into what I’d call, for lack of a better term, the “poetics of space,” after Gaston Bachelard’s book. I have been looking at DH mapping that does more straightforward kinds of mapping with travelogues that we would now consider literary – for instance, a text like Boswell’s tour of Hebrides with Samuel Johnson – and have been considering how to do something a little more hybrid for my project – integrating contemporary visual depictions of places into descriptions of them in 18th and 19th C literature.
(On another note, that Watership Down map in Plotted is nice to see – it’s not the first book that would come to my mind for this type of project. But I remember having such a hard time keeping a mental map of the warrens straight when I read it so long ago.)