Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS

Abstract

First edition. In Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS, author Charles Travis uses GIS technology to interpret, analyze, and visualize literary, historical, and philosophical texts. Travis's study shows how mapping language patterns, fictional landscapes, geographic spaces, and philosophical concepts helps support critical analysis. Travis bases his interpretive model upon the ancient Greek and Roman practice of geographia, and applies it to works by authors including Samuel Beckett, Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O'Brien, and James Joyce. Travis illustrates how scholars in the humanities can experiment with GIS to create visualizations that support and illustrate their critical analysis of humanities texts, and survey, navigate, and imagine various story-paths through space and time. Introduction. GIS and the digital humanities ; Toward the spatial turn ; Writing time and space with GIS: The conquest and mapping of seventeenth-century Ireland -- Writers, texts, and mapping. Toward a humanities GIS ; Modeling and visualizing in GIS: The topological influences of Homer's Odyssey and Dante's Inferno on James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) ; Psychogeographical GIS: Creating a "kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness," Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) ; Geovisualizing Beckett -- Toward a humanities GIS. The terrae incognitae of humanities GIS.