Brian Gutiérrez presents on mapping William Wordsworth's residence in London using a literary GIS methodology. He discusses three key challenges: shifts in mental and physical space, shifts in space and time associated with memory, and implicit references. He then explores alternative platforms and maps that push towards a more critical and speculative cartography, noting the value of experimenting with data structure and subjective user experiences. Finally, he thanks various collaborators for their support in developing this speculative literary mapping project.

1. Literary GIS Methodology Versus Platforms:
Technological Affordances and Their
Discontents
Brian R. Gutiérrez
Department of English
University of Washington
@brianrgutierrez

2. Overview of Talk
General overview of project
Describe some of the key challenges associated with the project in its current state and
how it has helped me to rethink the purpose of GIS in general and the role of the map
in particular
Point to maps that have helped me to see this mapping project in new ways
Present new ways to reconsider structuring geospatial data

3. Overview of Project
“A Cartographic Journey: Mapping William Wordsworth’s Residence in London”
Emerged from a question in my dissertation:
Make an argument that Wordsworth’s gothic drama The Borderers was informed by his visual cultural
experiences in London
Niche:
Mapping dramas, not simply novels (Franco Moretti, Stanford University) or poems

4. Definitions of GIS
Before we get started, here are a few defining characteristics from Michael F. Goodchild’s
“GIS and Geographical Research” that describe GIS as:
The ability to store and analyze spatial relationships between objects, such as crosses,
intersects, is adjacent to, or is connected to, or to compute them as required (often
called topology in the loose terminology of the GIS community)
The ability to store and analyze an unlimited number of attributes of each object
An emphasis on analysis, rather than simple data management and retrieval
The ability to integrate data from different sources, perhaps at different scales and using
more than one mode of representation

5. General Summary of Successes and Failures
Two-dimensional, with some excursions into three
Static, with some limited support for time-dependence, particularly in remotely sensed
imagery
Good at capturing the physical position of objects, their attributes, their spatial
relationships, but with very little capacity for representing other forms of interactions
between objects
A diverse and confusing set of data models, or general rules of spatial representation
Still dominated by the map metaphor, or the view of spatial database as a collection of
digital maps, particularly in the first three characteristics listed above

6. Three Challenges for Literary GIS Associated with
Mapping Wordsworth’s Residence in London
Shifts in mental and physical space
Shifts in space and time (especially as associated with memory)
Implicit references
Is the map a phenomenological reading of the poem?
Is the map, beyond its argumentative yield for the dissertation, attempting to best represent
Wordsworth’s experience in the city? (What are scholarly and/or pedagogical yields of the
map?)
Does a singular map unify a fractured (reading) experience? (cf. Guy Debord’s “Naked

7. Platforms as Thought Tools
Guy Debord’s “Naked City”
map from 1957

8. Shifts in Mental and Physical Space
SIX changeful years have vanished since I first
Poured out (saluted by that quickening breeze
Which met me issuing from the City's walls)
A glad preamble to this Verse: I sang
Aloud, with fervour irresistible
Of short-lived transport, like a torrent bursting,
From a black thunder-cloud, down Scafell's side
To rush and disappear
…
The last night's genial feeling overflowed
Upon this morning, and my favourite grove,
Tossing in sunshine its dark boughs aloft,
As if to make the strong wind visible,
Wakes in me agitations like its own,
A spirit friendly to the Poet's task,
Which we will now resume with lively hope,
Nor checked by aught of tamer argument 50
That lies before us, needful to be told.

9. Shifts in Space and Time Associated with Tales Told
Oh, wondrous power of words, by simple faith
Licensed to take the meaning that we love! 120
Vauxhall and Ranelagh! I then had heard
Of your green groves, and wilderness of lamps
Dimming the stars, and fireworks magical,
And gorgeous ladies, under splendid domes,
Floating in dance, or warbling high in air
The songs of spirits! Nor had Fancy fed
With less delight upon that other class
Of marvels, broad-day wonders permanent:
The River proudly bridged; the dizzy top
And Whispering Gallery of St. Paul's; the tombs 130
Of Westminster; the Giants of Guildhall;
Bedlam, and those carved maniacs at the gates,
Perpetually recumbent; Statues--man,
And the horse under him--in gilded pomp
Adorning flowery gardens, 'mid vast squares;
The Monument, and that Chamber of the Tower
Where England's sovereigns sit in long array,
Their steeds bestriding,--every mimic shape
Cased in the gleaming mail the monarch wore,
Whether for gorgeous tournament addressed, 140
Or life or death upon the battle-field.

10. Implicit References: Lincoln’s Inn Field
Thence back into the throng, until we reach,
Following the tide that slackens by degrees,
Some half-frequented scene, where wider streets
Bring straggling breezes of suburban air.
Here files of ballads dangle from dead walls;
Advertisements, of giant-size, from high
Press forward, in all colours, on the sight;
These, bold in conscious merit, lower down;
That, fronted with a most imposing word,
Is, peradventure, one in masquerade.
As on the broadening causeway we advance,
Behold, turned upwards, a face hard and strong
In lineaments, and red with over-toil.
'Tis one encountered here and everywhere;
A travelling cripple, by the trunk cut short,
And stumping on his arms. In sailor's garb
Another lies at length, beside a range
Of well-formed characters, with chalk inscribed
Upon the smooth flat stones: the Nurse is here,
The Bachelor, that loves to sun himself,
The military Idler, and the Dame,

11. Shifts in Mental and Physical Space: 2.0
List of major shifts in place:
Scafell to Dove Cottage,
Lake District to London,
London to Cambridge,
London (“Half-rural Sadler’s Wells)
to Buttermere (Lake District),
London and Rome,
to Alcairo (Cairo), Babylon,
and Persepolis (in the same sentence)
Wave City Inception Coffee Table by Stelios Mousarris
Coffee table by Stelio Mousarri

12. Shifts in Mental and Physical Space: 2.0
Eric Sheppard has invoked the concept of the wormhole “as a way of describing the concrete geographies of
positionality and their non-Euclidian relationship to the Earth’s surface.” --See Eric Sheppard, “Space and Times in
Globalization: Place, Scale, Networks, and Positionality”
Luke Bergmann (Asst. Prof.
UW Geography) Nick Lally
(Graduate Student, U. Wisc
Geography)
“Enfolding: An Experimental
Geographic Imagination
System”
Folding two maps together
(e.g., map of london and map
of Lake District)

13. Shifts in Space and Time: 2.0 Memory of Tales Told
Oh, wondrous power of words, by simple faith
Licensed to take the meaning that we love! 120
Vauxhall and Ranelagh!
I then had heard
Of your green groves, and wilderness of lamps
Dimming the stars, and fireworks magical,
And gorgeous ladies, under splendid domes,
Floating in dance, or warbling high in air
The songs of spirits!
Instead of a point on a map, an image that depicts
most accurately, Wordsworth’s subjective experience.
Like the many walking tour maps of London published
at the end of the eighteenth century, the Microcosm provides
what Henri Lefebvre would call “representations of space.”
Image from Rudolf Akermann’s Microcosm of London, Plate 88, 1808.

14. Shifts in Space and Time: 2.0 Memory of Tales Told
View of image and point in
Neatline exhibit.

15. Implicit References: Lincoln’s Inn Field
Thence back into the throng, until we reach,
Following the tide that slackens by degrees,
Some half-frequented scene, where wider streets
Bring straggling breezes of suburban air.
Here files of ballads dangle from dead walls;
Advertisements, of giant-size, from high
Press forward, in all colours, on the sight;
These, bold in conscious merit, lower down;
That, fronted with a most imposing word,
Is, peradventure, one in masquerade.
As on the broadening causeway we advance,
Behold, turned upwards, a face hard and strong
In lineaments, and red with over-toil.
'Tis one encountered here and everywhere;
A travelling cripple, by the trunk cut short,
And stumping on his arms. In sailor's garb
Another lies at length, beside a range
Of well-formed characters, with chalk inscribed
Upon the smooth flat stones: the Nurse is here,
The Bachelor, that loves to sun himself,
The military Idler, and the Dame,
What started as an issue of coding concrete placenames--notes tell us
that Wordsworth lived in the Inn in 1797--quickly became an issue of
“grounding”; that is displaying a phenomenological view not as
simply a point on a map from above, but at the ground-level, as a way
to catch the sociality of the passage. (cf. LaDona Knigge and Meghan
Cope’s “Grounded Visualization: Integrating the Analysis of
Qualitative and Quantitative Data through Grounded Theory and
Visualization.”)
Nealine: How to show the widening of the streets and a “grounded”
viewpoint?

16. Maps that Push
towards a
Critical and Speculative
Cartography
William Bunge’s Atlas of Nuclear War
1988 (Right)
Neatline: use sketching tools (SVG tool)
for lines as well as points (cf. Franco
Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel,
1800-1900)

17. Critical Cartography: Champlain’s Travels in Canada

18. “They Would Not Take Me: There: People, Places, and Stories from Champlain’s Travels
in Canada 1603-1616” by Michael Hermann and Margaret Pearce (in Cartographic
Perspectives, Number 66, Fall 2010.
Neatline: Adobe Illustrator
Use an image as base-
layer

19. Speculative Computing/Speculative Design
Simply “playing with the data” has
been most valuable:
*Altering the structure of the data
*Code for subjective experiences
*Use graphical database to show
relational properties
*experiment with UX
“We defined speculative computing to push subjective and
probabilistic concepts of knowledge as experience (partial,
situated, and subjective) against objective and mechanistic
claims for knowledge as information (total, managed, and
externalized).”
– Johanna Drucker, 2009
SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing

20. Many Thanks to...
The University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities for their generous
support of the Mapping Wordsworth project through the “Summer DH Dissertation
Fellowship”
Luke Bergmann (UW Geography) for the several enlightening conversations about
“More than Cartesian Spaces,” his excellent course on Critical GIS, and for introducing
me to the speculative app that he co-designed with Nick Lally (U. Wisc. Geography)
Ian Gregory (Lancaster Unv. U.K., Geography) for his support and guidance through
the initial coding stages of this project