The talk will begin at 12:30 on Thursday, October 29th. The length is scheduled for 90 minutes. The location is Event Space (ground floor), 244 Greene St., New York, NY (Google map).

A shorter version of what will be the first chapter of the project I’m working on, Making Maps: Mixed Methods and Everyday Criticism, this talk looks at, among other things, the promise of the digital humanities as a methodological approach to literary study during our “post-critical” moment, and I see how a specifically geospatial DH approach can remain in line with it. This approach is then refined towards an open-ended “everyday criticism.”

There will be a few maps and digital humanities’s scent will be in the air, but the talk will not be aimed exclusively at DH specialists.

So if you manage to wriggle free that afternoon, I hope you’ll come by.

Graffito from March 2010, photographed in Chelsea.

Starting 1 September, I will be Faculty Fellow in the Department of English in the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University. I’m very excited about this opportunity, and I can’t wait to see what awaits me in a middling Atlantic burg that can’t even manage to be the capital of its own state (unlike, say, Boston).

My three semesters at VGTU were extremely challenging and interesting, but I thank my colleagues there and wish them the best. Perhaps we’ll collaborate in the future. I also wish my former students safe travels navigating an increasingly neoliberalized Europe that keeps debasing the value of higher education and pedagogy.

I look forward to working with a whole new group of colleagues and students, both at NYU and in the larger NYC(DH) community.

I’ve lived in Europe non-stop since September 2009. While I love it out here and will miss my friends and accomplices in Paris and Vilnius (and Didžioji Riešė!), I am also ready to see at least one episode Game of Thrones live for a change.

Finally, thanks to Lauren, Ken, Bethany, and Kara.

Now it’s time to get back to work.

I was never a huge Deadhead, but I’ve got a few CDs, records, tapes, and, oh, about 25Gb of mp3s. I eagerly went to bt.etree.org over the weekend to download the Santa Clara shows and start downloading the Chicago shows once tapers started putting their recordings online. I’ve liked Trey’s take on the Dead before, so I figured this would be neat. Plus, history.

After listening to the first show, though, I was startled at how “old” it sounded. It felt like all of the songs were from the 1960s, including a “Dark Star” > “St. Stephen” > “The Eleven” > “Lovelight” similar to the opening of the seminal album Live/Dead. Were the musicians doing this on purpose, I wondered. Would each show take us a bit later in the Dead’s history, with the final show featuring “Unbroken Chain,” recorded in 1974, but performed live for the first time only in 1995?

I took the setlists, removed “Drums” and “Space” (for aesthetic and academic reasons), and used the The SetList Program, which hits the Deadbase for setlists of all known Dead shows, to get the year in which each song performed on this five-concert run was first performed. This chart goes towards answering my question:

The chart. Click to make larger, scale correctly.

My suspicion about the first show was dead on. It featured exclusively songs from the first five years of the Dead’s existence. Similarly, it feels from the chart that the trend goes upward as the shows advance. Incidentally, the blue line tracks each song, and the orange line is a running, five-song average. The green vertical lines are setbreaks, and the red vertical lines split the shows up.

More interesting, however, are the set and show averages I took using this data. They help show better what kind of repertoire the band was working with in each concert. Provided are the average year of all the songs performed in both sets, then the show as a whole. Each set also has a standard deviation of years:

• 27 June, Santa Clara: I: 1968, 1.6; II: 1967, 0.7; Show: 1968, 1.2
• 28 June, Santa Clara: I: 1974, 5.6; II: 1972, 3.4; Show: 1973, 4.7
• 3 July, Chicago: I: 1974, 2.7; II: 1973, 3.1; Show: 1973, 2.9
• 4 July, Chicago: I: 1976, 9.4; II: 1976, 6.7; Show: 1976, 7.9
• 5 July, Chicago: I: 1975, 8.4; II: 1979, 9.8; Show: 1977, 9.1

What do we see? The show-length averages did go up from show to show, with a felicitous average year of 1976 for the show on America’s birthday. And though the third show and second show both have 1973 as their average year, the first set in Chicago featured more late 70s work than any previous set had. But the standard deviations also back up the feeling. The first show “consciously” stuck to the old hits, shown by its miniscule standard deviation, and the repertoire expanded as the shows progressed, with the final show picking classics from the 60s (“China > Rider”, “Not Fade Away”) as well as “Unbroken Chain,” and second set standby “Days Between” from the 1990s and “Built to Last” from the eponymous final Dead studio album, released in 1990. No surprise the standard deviation for that grab bag of 30 years of songs is over nine!

Who knows if this was an intentional decision by the musicians. I feel like it cannot have been otherwise; the first show included songs that had fallen out of the Dead’s repertoire (“Saint Stephen,” “Cream Puff War,” and “What’s Become of the Baby,” which was only performed once, in 1969), and the duo of “Unbroken Chain,” and “Days Between” feel like a farewell to the band and to Garcia, but a farewell immediately made optimistic, if not defiant, by “Not Fade Away,” one of my favorite Dead covers, which the band played over 500 times, making it one of the most played songs in their book.

I never saw the Dead; I blew off a chance to see a show at Soldier Field in 1995, figuring I’d catch them later. I don’t really regret it, as I was still just getting to know the band then. But they’ve left behind so much that is so rich, that these five shows have been a blast to listen to, reliving the band’s history one set at a time.

Back then, though, it was the main harbor for Vilnius (sitting just past a bend on the Neris). There was also a marketplace where the square now is (but that might have come later).

Most notably, though, Lukiškės was the neighborhood that housed Vilnius’s Muslim population. Mostly made up of Tatars who were brought in to fight against the Teutonic knights, the Muslims had their own mosque and cemetery in Lukiškės.

Of the cemetery and mosque, nothing remains except the street, Mečetės gatvė (meaning “Mosque Street”), testifying to the historical memory of a place of worship that is now long gone. But on Monday, I happened to be walking down this teeny tiny street that many natives of Vilnius might not know about, and saw, right underneath the street sign, our good old friend, the fascist Celtic cross.

Yes, I was reminded of the anti-foreign ownership stickers covering the street signs announcing Žydų g. (“Jews’ Street”). And, incidentally, the tag was on the building that houses the bar Alaus Namai, which still wins for the highest concentration of fascist imagery I’ve seen in one place in Vilnius that wasn’t a football match.

JAUNIUS, 18: A gun in your hands doesn’t define your manliness [boredpanda.com]

Thousands have joined the paramilitary Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, and the first lottery round in mid-May was largely taken up by volunteers, as fears of war continue to mount.

But, well, things haven’t gone particularly smoothly for those who are upset over their names’ being called by the state. They took to social media or news portals to vent their dissatisfaction, where the typical storm of keyboard warriors have aimed to shoot them down with shame bullets.

In the meantime, Beata Tiškevič-Hasanova (a television personality) and photographer/polisci student Neringa Rekašiūtė decided to capture this complicated moment on film. They took portraits of 14 young men, in tears and uniforms, and added texts from the men. The project ended up on Lithuanian content site Bored Panda and elsewhere.

How did the internet respond? How do you expect? Privilege stays privilege, man.

The hashtag “#verktiniai” showed (a play on the word for “draftee” and translated roughly as “crytee”) in social media as able-bodied men, able to stand for military service themselves, in positions of privilege, took photos of themselves crying with “ironic” (this is debatable) sentiments attached. Successful author and former emigré Andrius Užkalnis, for example, posted beside his teary visage, “I live in a rented apartment in Vilnius, I don’t have a degree, I write articles and books for a living. No one told me life would be like this. I’m going to emigrate.” Upon this followed the typical stream of memes with Stalin crying and the like.

Tiškevič-Hasanova and Rekašiūtė’s project is interesting on its own merits, but the #verktiniai business is especially galling while also indicative of the problems associated with the conservative/liberal (libertarian) ascendancy that makes up the yuppie landscape in this country.¹

It’s safe for the likes of Užkalnis to mock youths who have to, against their will, go and follow the whims of an anti-Russian id run amok, an id that is part and parcel of the very political wing that Užkalnis (who reveres Ronald Reagan, a man who responded to national service by filming war movies in Hollywood) represents. There is no more reliable fount of anti-Russian sentiment than, for example, the grand don of the conservative movement MEP Vytautas Landsbergis.

By taking to internet mockery (I can’t possibly call these lame efforts “satire”), these privileged men of the right are only exposing their complete lack of humanity regarding the very citizens they are excoriating for not feeling their duty as citizens sufficiently acutely. Someone like Jaunius, above, (a name, incidentally, that connotes youth) is pressed into service to protect his unknown fellow citizens.

And in the meantime, you have liberals, committed to gutting the state, bullying Jaunius’s revulsion at what the state asks of him. Keyboard warriors armed with cell phones and some glycerin make the edgy comedy of making fun of someone who is terrified of war.

The chickenhawks think they’re acting like tough drill sergeants, perhaps, but really they’re just being morally repugnant bullies, mocking that which they choose (since they, of course, could still enlist if they like) to never experience themselves.

One of the most common complaints I make about Lithuanian political life  is the prevalence of the “Wir waren nicht die Täter! Wir waren die Opfer!” mentality. This is not unique to Lithuania, of course. GamerGate and MRAs testify to that.

But there simply is no other narrative in Lithuanian political life. The fact of having been part of the Soviet Union excuses complicity in the Holocaust, excuses abuses against various minorities, excuses persistent casual racism, excuses neo-Nazism, and so on.² And when this incessant victimology gets mixed with neoliberal ideology, all it does is mask privilege.

The #verktiniai photos and memes hide the privilege of the men who are making them. Living in their libertarian fantasies of bootstrapped lives where the only privilege they have has been earned by thriving in the free market, these men can’t see past their own privilege of simply not being among those who have been pressed. Užkalnis is old enough to have served in the Soviet Army (I don’t know if he did or did not), but younger authors involved in #verktiniai have not served. And, perhaps, will never serve.

They complain about the government. They campaign for and elect radical libertarians like Remigijus Šimašius (a product of the Mies Institute and the Heritage Foundation!). They are actively committed to gutting the safety net because they, personally, don’t need it; they’re the ascendant yuppie overmen, able to earn livings without the government’s help.

And yet, as Užkalnis writes elsewhere:

nerašyk visiems savo lame-ass pasiteisinimų
ir shut the fuck up.
Tau tėvynė nieko nedavė?
Tau tai viską davė.
Tik tavo mamai nedavė
kontraceptinės piliulės.

don’t write everyone your lame-ass excuses
and shut the fuck up.
Your homeland gave you nothing?
It gave you everything.
It only failed to give your mom
the Pill³

He chides the draftee, adopting the male privilege of mom jokes by stating that his mother, too poor to buy her own birth control, relied on the state—the very state that the liberals are intent on wrecking—which did not provide it, either.

The strength of the state, which suddenly is so important (though note that Užkalnis refers to “homeland,” not “state”), is not ensured by terrified conscripts at the border. It is ensured by an educated, healthy, and comfortable populace. Precisely the kind of populace that the liberals and conservatives have no interest of ever seeing in Lithuania.

1. Following European tradition, in Lithuania, “liberal” connotes what, in the US, would be called “libertarian.”
2. To be fair, the liberals are the most LBGTQ friendly party in Lithuania, but that hurdle is practically buried in the ground.
3. Yes, code-switching is a particularly delightful affectation that Užkalnis cannot seem to control

As my first full year of teaching in Lithuania draws to a close, one of the things I miss most about American (and/or my specific) models of education is the US’s lack of such rigidity. I miss majors.

For my own undergraduate career, our courseload was distributed among three more or less equally sized chunks. There was the Common Core (n quarters of humanities, n of math), my major, and electives. I think that literally the only course that every student at Chicago took was Bio 101.

In my major, English, the only class every English student took was English 101, which was also in part designed by the instructor. The rest of the major involved meeting certain distribution requirements. Other majors had more rigid structures, but one’s major, as structured as it was, would never take up more than I think about half of your courses.

Now compare that with the two humanistic-ish study programs offered by my university, Creative Industries and Entertainment Industries. Clicking on the links takes one to the table that shows, semester-by-semester, every course the student will take. In Creative Industries, of the 360 credits needed to graduate, only 8 are completely free electives. A further 50 credits are electives, but they have to be among a pre-selected list of 2–4 courses, like French, English or German, or, as will be the case when I teach the third years next spring, “Smart Information Communication Technology Systems,” “Theatrical Communication,” or my course, “Cultural Narratives.” In Entertainment Industries, 8 credits, again, are completely free. But only an additional 27 involve some kind of choice.

When students enroll in a study program, they are placed in a certain group. In my experience, the groups are about 20–30 students in size. Lecture courses teach the entire cohort, and discussion sections are for the specific group. That means that for fully 3/4 of the courses at my university, at least, the course is taken with the same exact group of 30 people, with the whole cohort joining in on lectures.

Outside of foreign language courses, I don’t think I took more than what could be considered 20 credits’ worth of courses with any single other student. Here, you spend almost 3/4 of your undergraduate career with the same 30 people. With Entertainment Industries students, it’s just over 90% of your courses with the same people. It’s not for nothing that Lithuanians have a word for “person who was in my study program group at univeristy”: grupiokas.

This causes four immediate pedagogical problems, in my opinion:

1. Lack of diversity regarding students. The student’s group becomes a kind of family. They take all the same courses, experience all the same things. That’s sometimes good. But it’s sometimes bad. It’s useful to be exposed to all kinds of students from other disciplines.
2. Greater resentment towards required courses. When the vast majority of a program is determined ahead of time, the student runs into a lot of required courses that the student may just check out of. I know that I resented some of the courses I was required to take, and my list was relatively short. This also instrumentalizes the diploma, about which more in another post maybe. Courses become hurdles that just have to be met and passed. Not opportunities to expand knowledge.
3. Class sizes are immense. Egregious absenteeism (50%+) doesn’t hide the fact that if I had all of my students for the course I taught last fall in the audience at once, I’d be teaching to almost 70 students. The course I’m TAing now has almost 100 students in it, because in both circumstances, we are teaching the whole cohort. This seems insane to me—like a course taken by every English major at the same time.
4. Passing the course becomes the most important outcome. This is related to the second point, but if a student cannot continue with the study program without a passing grade, then getting that grade becomes all that is important. In my undergrad career, if a class didn’t sit well with me, I’d withdraw and take another. Or I’d take it again the next year. Here, no such option exists. A student cannot simply take “Cultural Narratives” another semester.

As I wrote at the start, nearly all of Europe follows this model, and I imagine some American majors (like maybe engineering) are rather similar. But I feel really bad for my students that they don’t have the benefits of the American model, since each of my four points only worsens their educational experience. It also puts me, as a teacher, at a greater distance from that experience. I have to handle a completely instrumentalized pedagogical process, where students become indistinct raw materials running through a diploma mill.

And yet I don’t know if there’s anything at all I can do about it. Local colleagues laugh at my naïve desires to provide students an environment that isn’t confrontational, that allows me to give them responsibilty, that lets them earn my trust, and that gives them space to actually grow intellectually (and more than that). Instead, the focus seems to be on how to find that sweet spot between scrambling efforts to cheat and mechanizing every aspect of grading.

It’s been a hard year. A very hard year. I made a lot of mistakes. But it’s clear I still have a lot of thinking to do about how to approach next year.

On the one hand, you have Cécile Alduy and Stéphane Wahnich’s Marine Le Pen prise aux mots, which argues (using statistics!) that the messages expressed by Le Pen père and fille don’t really differ all that much, but the current party president is actively using a different rhetoric in a kind of sleight of hand.

Alduy has given multiple interviews (in French) about the magic tricks used by the younger Le Pen, and including one in Paris Match. That interview includes a dataviz of three weeks (> 45k) of tweets from both FN officials (twitter bird with sash) and FN activists (twitter bird with no sash). The party line wants to talk about the economy. The activists, immigration.

On the other hand, then, it’s hard to tell what’s going on on television and in the news, where the current president is asking the honorary president to terminate his political responsibilities and considering disciplinary action against the party’s cofounder after the honorary president threw some red meat on the grill in the form of an interview in a magazine. Said cofounder, in the meantime, is arguing that the current president is being manipulated “by the system.”

So, OK, political squabbles are political squabbles. Parties undergo generational shifts. But a huge chunk of this spectacle, at least for me, is the family component. It’s distractingly tempting to blow the dust off Sophocles when reading these articles or watching the little TV snippets. That idea from the Alduy article—the words are different, but not the ideas—strikes at this fantasy of some kind of familial inherence. Marine Le Pen can’t help but be her father, making her continued ascent in French politics ever more troublesome.

MLA liked the proposal, and a special session, “Geocritical Explorations inside the Text,” was born. It has its own webpage, where the abstracts will appear by 1 November and where there already are bios of the three presenters (Alba Newmann Holmes, Michael A. Smith, and Amy D. Wells) and the respondent (Robert T. Tally Jr.). I also included the proposal itself.

It’s pretty obvious that I’m beyond excited about this, so I’m grateful for everyone who answered the CFP! Let’s have an interesting and productive time in Vancouver!

Aw, what’s a fascist flag or two at the footy?

Questions of the true scope of neo-Nazism in eastern Europe continue to bubble to the top in recent weeks. Now that Svoboda has ministry dossiers, they are no longer a far right party with a fascist past. Well, maybe some members have that past. But not all. It’s, as Billmon remarked, reminiscent of one of the Monty Python sketches about the Royal Navy. “There is no cannibalism in the British Navy,” explains the officer. “Absolutely none. And when I say none, I mean a certain amount.” The irony is that the cannibalism then takes over the sketch, must like fascist elements would probably take over any party full of “ex”-fascists.

Lithuania has her own far-right elements, who like to parade with thinly disguised neo-Nazi symbols during national holidays, who fly the Ukrainian Pravyj Sektor’s flag at football matches, and so on. Just last night, while recovering from a pub quiz which has in the past asked contestants to identify, by ear, the “ex”-far-right band Diktatūra, talked moved to “fascists I’ve known,” as some regaled us with stories of hard-liners among the Lithuanian scouts in the US, others about the farther flung neighborhoods of Vilnius, and so on. But talk returned, as it always does when discussing neo-nazis, to Kaunas.

So it was a ghoulish irony that I read today the story of the man hanging out in a pizzeria in downtown Kaunas while dressed as a Nazi. Still not convinced that this isn’t an April Fool’s joke (it’s both eminently believable and completely insane), I’ll reproduce the key elements:

Nacių uniforma vilkintis tipas Kauno kavinėje „Pizza Jazz“ darbuotojų nepapiktino – šokiravo tik hitlerininkų mostu pasveikintą užsienietį

A man wearing a Nazi uniform didn’t faze the workers at the Kaunas café “Pizza Jazz.” Only a foreigner, greeted by a Hitler salute, was shocked.

As you can see, most of the story is in the headline.

R.Shofieldas užkalbino uniformuotą lankytoją, kai šis išėjo parūkyti ir pasveikino užsienietį hitlerininkų mostu. Lietuvis pavaišino R.Shofieldą cigaretę ir paklaustas, ką jis veikia, atsakė: „Ieškau žydų sudeginti“.

[“The foreigner” Richard] Shofield struck up a conversation with the uniformed guest, when the latter came outside to have a smoke and greeted the foreigner with a Hitler salute. The Lithuanian gave Shofield a cigarette and responded, when asked what he’s doing, that he’s “looking for Jews to burn.”

The article continues to explain how dumbfounded Shofield was that no one seemed at all bothered by this display. The waitress refused to get a manager, so finally Shofield called the police himself. (Publicly displaying Nazi or Soviet symbols is, incidentally, against Lithuanian law.)

The police came within 13 minutes and apprehended the man. The only details given about him were his initials, his birth year (1975), and that he blew a .18. His explanation was that he was his way home (at 9pm) from a costume party and decided to have some fun at the pizzeria.

On the one hand, the sheer gall of the man is startling, but what the article passes over uncritically is that no one cared at all except the foreigner. But it ties in with what I’ve long viewed as a sort of casual apathy towards the far-right here. The tiniest leftward movement means you’re in favor of the return of work camps and portraits of Stalin. But a man prancing around the center of Kaunas dressed as a Nazi? Chill, man, he’s just doing it for the lulz.

But today, they promised something a little extra special. The event was billed as “Young politicians vs. Pianoman,” as a trio of men at the start of their political careers would face off against questions from the crowd. A thrilling premise was enough to entice me to go.

Even in its design, the event was a bit peculiar, however. The three politicians represent what I consider the young, urban mainstream of politically active Lithuania: Remigijus Šimašius, a former Minister of Justice and current MP and Vilnius city councilman probably felt the home-field advantage at the bar, which trends (if I had to guess) liberal. His counterpart in the Seimas, Jūras Požela, represented the party in power, the Social Democrats (LSDP). And, finally, Gabrielius Landsbergis, a political neophyte of such a degree that he has a Wikipedia page in neither Lithuanian nor English, represented the TS-LKD, or conservative party.

None of the assembled men is over 40 (nor is any under 30), and the idea is that they represent the future of Lithuanian politics. In that case, the future is rather one- (that is to say, center-right-) sided. The lack of a politician from an active, vocal left-wing demonstrated how, yet again, there is virtually no such thing as a left-wing in Lithuanian politics. The political machinery of the state grinds between two entrenched establishments (TS-LKD and LSDP), with only the free-market-fueled liberals offering an alternative to the urbane crowd at Pianoman. Furthermore, the populist parties that earn constituents in countryside ridings were also absent from the debate.

But, again, I shouldn’t be surprised. The landscape is what it is.

Even with these caveats, however, the evening left me underwhelmed. The “debate,” suggested by the use of the word “vs” in the event’s Facebook title, was moderated by Vaidas Saldžiūnas, an editor at Lietuvos rytas. Unfortunately, his questions provoked few, if any, moments for actual disagreement. He asked, for example, where each politician was when Lithuania declared independence in 1990 (for the record, I was at Disney World, making my story better than any of theirs). Saldžiūnas then offered the politicians a chance to make pitches to the allegedly more apolitical members of the crowd. None responded with the kind of demagoguery one might expect in a beer-hall.

Finally, discussions moved to talk about Ukraine, in which there’s a strong consensus among these three parties. That question, though, did provoke Landsbergis into saying the only interesting (or perhaps controversial?) thing of the evening. He suggested that maybe we were foolish to think that the Soviet Union would never return, closing his statement with “Nebijoti mes nebegalime” (we can no longer afford to be unafraid). I turned to my neighbor and said that I’ve been hearing that kind of talk from someone surnamed Landsbergis for over two decades now. Like grandfather, like grandson, amirite?

Interestingly, the unprovocative nature of the questions still yielded a certain edge to the proceedings as each party’s camp (each chose their own whiskey barrel around which to congregate) would talk loudly whenever the other two parties’ politicians would be speaking. I quickly guessed the political geography of Pianoman just from listening to the noise. And this noise was the final undoing of the debate, because the assembled were disrupting the politicians, who were already struggling with technical difficulties that made it tricky for any of them to speak for more than a few seconds before the wireless mic connection dropped out.

The opportunity to have three (presumably very) different politicians talk over a few issues of the day was undercut by the public’s astonishing disinterest in letting the politicians, you know, talk.

But maybe that was, in a way, the point. Even in an actively political event like this one, apathy and/or competitive nature make a farce of the effort itself. Požela and Landsbergis both responded to the question about what would they say to someone who “isn’t political” by asserting that they see spontaneous, political activity from the youth of Lithuania around them, citing the hundreds who have participated in flash protests regarding the situation in Ukraine and Crimea. A politics of flash mobs and Facebook is, to self-loathingly sound Gladwellian for a second, hardly a politics at all, however.

And so Požela, when asked if he expected this kind of Lithuania after 24 years of independence, made a comment that can be read, post facto, as a sly critique of the apathy and/or rudeness of the crowd. Recalling that he, himself, was only seven years old in 1990, he remarked that Lithuania would be much, much better off if it had started forming a political generation out of those seven year olds back then.¹

Because it’s clear that Lithuania didn’t.

1. Incidentally, I moderated a Q&A with Vytautas Landsbergis in 2012, and he called on the youth surrounding him to form a separate party and rejuvenate the political system. To bring, and I quote, some “jazz” back to politics. I liked this idea very, very much. That is, a political movement with jazz would be steeped in and familiar with its history, but it would be also always willing to break out of that history and bend it into a nearly unrecognizable shape as it forges a future. Hearing his grandson sound just like him, then, I saw that this was a vulgar kind of jazz: the boring mimicry that lacks artistry.

Presentations and discussion of conflicts/crises from qualitative (geocritical) and/or quantitative (geostatistical) GIS analyses or pedagogy of the spaces produced *inside* the literary object.

This cfp is my attempt to reenergize the “spatial turn” in the humanities by trying to reconfigure, hybridize, or otherwise splice together its two more common strands.

Background

Typically, if a line of inquiry makes use of geographic software, either within a formal GIS or less formal “neogeographic” object, then the geography under study is outside of literary objects. Several brilliant examples of this kind of analysis of the literary object in space have appeared as the interest in geographic software and its learning curve have followed divergent paths. Online sites such as the Mapping the Lakes project at Lancaster University or the Mapping the Republic of Letters project at Stanford have blended the geographic and the literary in inspirational ways, leading to, among other things, David Joseph Wrisley’s fascinating special session at last year’s MLA conference, “Geospatial Literary Studies.”

But even in Wrisley’s session, the space within the objects never took front stage. Kristen Doyle Highland’s rich analysis of bookstore locations in New York City gave absolute primacy to geolocation outside the books being sold. Rachael King‘s mapping the knowledge network of British newspapers and diplomatic letters invoked the content of the news articles (and letters), but equally significant to King’s thesis seemed to be how the diplomats were distributed around Europe, which would then influence how their physical presence here or there helped expand the British knowledge network. Anne Stachura’s presentation focused on the use of maps to establish a narrative of influenza, where the map precedes the scholarly investigation. And, finally, Anupam Basu’s presentation, which was most deeply devoted to the simple content of literary objects, visualized network graphs in lieu of geographical spaces. Basu is datamining the EEBO to try and teach a computer to geoparse (looking at names, not space) texts from a time when good maps, gazetteers, and the like were scarce.

The other strand of the spatial turn makes little use of maps and probably hardly any use of software. Its intellectual lineage, drawn out clearly in Tally’s Spatiality, is a mix of French spatialists like Lefebvre, de Certeau, Foucault, and Deleuze (and Guattari) with the Anglo-American contributions of Soja, Harvey, and Massey, among others. To tie them together and give the process a literary scholarly imprimatur, critics look to Jameson, Bachelard, and Bakhtin. This tradition yields, for example, Geocriticism, where Westphal argues that there is a relationship between the referent of the world and the representation of the world, where each influences the other. This “oscillation” resembles Bakhtin’s chronotope, which Holquist and Clark call a “bridge,” joining the worlds inside the text to the worlds outside.

Westphal’s many examples in Geocriticism show the inverse of the strand above. It is precisely what is inside the novel that gets the focus of the geocritical interest, to such a degree that Westphal suggests a form of literary criticism where the focus is not on an author’s novels over time (or the author’s representation of space), but, rather, on a space and the myriad representations surrounding it—Westphal frequently returns to the Mediterranean, for example, and to literary representations of Sardinia and Sicily in putting geocriticism into practice.

These two strands feel rather like the third and second chapters of Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel, respectively. For me, it has always seemed that Moretti’s book is a bit disjointed, in that “maps!” is insufficient glue to hold the chapters together. As far as I recall, little work is done bridging what I see as the epistemological chasm between, on the one hand, cartesian-inflected “GIS work” (for lack of a better word) and the resolutely anti-cartesian work of geocriticism.

This chasm I’ve alluded to before, and the fields of Qualitative GIS as well as (what I suppose could be called) feminist GIS have emerged to try and bridge the two outside of a specifically literary dimension. Within the field of literary studies, I eagerly devoured Wells’s “La cartographie comme outil d’analyse littéraire,” which features a GIS-driven investigation into the content of literary objects (specifically Nightwood). The Digital Humanities Hub at the University of Birmingham is sponsoring a workshop on the topic at the end of April, “Telling Stories with Maps.” I’ve also started sketching out efforts of blending the two strands in my look at For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I’m half-secretly working on one for Dos Passos’s U.S.A. In other words, I’m not the only person thinking about these things.

The Special Session

Hence the special session, which I hope will bring together scholars also trying (and succeeding or failing) in tying these two strands together by using technology typically saved for texts in the world to investigate, instead, the worlds in the text. This investigation can be done in the classroom, in a dissertation (as it was for me), or in other scholarly work.

Obviously, the session is only as good as the abstracts I get from others, but I hope with this kind of background, I can encourage more people to sign up. Considering how tricky both strands are to do on their own, with their own epistemological pitfalls and the like, trying to tie them together carefully and usefully is exceptionally tricky (and sidetracked my own work, depending on how we’re counting, for over a year).

I think it can be done, however, and I’ve seen it done. What I hope to do is showcase it in a way that shows its difference from either strand on its own.

1. Only today do I recognize the accidental, but not not useful, reference to Tally’s edited volume of the same name.

Since the protests started in Kyiv, a handful of people I know have been down to the protests either as journalists or as student demonstrators. The issue has been on the forefront of discussions in bars in Vilnius for months, and the repressions by the Berkut in late January caused interest out here to get even more acute. It was only then, for example, that I started reading more about the issue, since it was clear that this wasn’t just about a simplistic “are you pro-West or pro-Russia?” position.

But the iconography of the ribbon with the two flags pushed me over the edge into actually criticizing the form that the automatic, unconsidered support of “Ukraine” (or, maybe more subtly “Ukrainians”) that has taken root here.

We have a state with a democratically elected president. The election was close, and there were worries (on both sides) about election rigging, but the international observers decreed it a fair election. And now a group that was democratically put in opposition have taken to extra-legislative means to try to influence the government. Hence, supporting “Ukrainians” or “Ukraine” makes little sense: which Ukraine do you support? which Ukrainians?

Pairing the Lithuanian and Ukrainian flags shifts the conflict from one of state power vs. an allegedly peaceful mass to one that pits Ukrainians against Russians. The former I can, and typically do, support. The latter I cannot.

The latter is growing in steam as we read Bernard-Henri Lévy (the neoliberal celebrity d/b/a a socialist philosopher)’s call for the EU to withdraw from the Olympics in Sochi and Edward Lucas (the favorite journalist of the Lithuanian bourgeoisie)’s resting all the Ukrainian blood on Putin’s and the EU’s doorsteps. Candy to reflexive anti-Russian, nationalist positions in Lithuania.

These responses—this support—rid the people gathered in “Euromaidan” of their own agency and their own ability to determine their destinies. They are simply, permanently, victims. Victims of Berkut oppression, of Russian interference, of European and American indifference.

Victims who have an arsenal of petrol bombs, of course. Victims who have incapacitated and killed police officers, as well (not that I tend to side with state power). But agency lacking victims, nonetheless.

In treating this gathered populace as voiceless victims, abandoned by the west, their protectors emerge: the far-right Svoboda party and the really-fucking-far-right Pravyi Sektor, the militants who refused to agree to the cease fire yesterday. When I saw a person on Facebook suggest a blood drive in Lithuania to help with transfusions in Kyiv, my initial response was that I don’t think my mongrel blood would be appreciated among the Pravyi Sektor. Probably not even among Svoboda, which wants a Ukraine strictly for Ukrainians.

In late January, The Nation published an article highlighting the far-right elements who are reaping benefits from Euromaidan. I encourage people to consider the endgame of Euromaidan, should “Ukraine”—the Ukraine of my Facebook friends’ ribbons—win. It would be another government beholden to the oligarchy in Ukraine, but with a delectable nationalist horror around the corner. Some win for “Europe,” no?

I read an interview today provided by the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste with a Ukrainian economist, Zakhar Popovych. Popovych sounds like the leftist from a century ago warning about being lulled by affective (and effective!) images of bleeding people into supporting a nationalist political program which would cripple and destroy the forces that are at work at what is the central issue facing Ukraine: the oligarchic kleptocracy that has crippled the state and the body politic. As Popovych explains,

Malheureusement le scénario le plus probable est la mise en place d’un régime de droite, autoritaire et nationaliste. Même si le parti Svoboda arrive à pacifier, voire à écraser les bandes nationalistes les plus radicales, l’entrée de ce parti dans le gouvernement aboutira à l’oppression systématique de la gauche radicale et progressiste.

That’s not something I’m terribly interested in supporting. Popovych was also involved in the Left Opposition’s drafting of 10 theses regarding the situation in Ukraine, and I further encourage people to read at least Popvych’s introduction as well as the Left Opposition’s introduction. Journalists beholden to global finance (see above) are more interested in bleeding-hence-leading iconography. But that blood will have been spilled in vain if the new king is the same as the old king. And nothing I have seen among the political support so freely given to the “Ukrainians” on Facebook and elsewhere suggests that any effort is under consideration to change that sad, sad fact.

It’s in the dead middle of Old Town that Žydų g. (Jewish St.)—a name first attested in the 16th century—appears, where it meets Vokiečių g. (German St.).² When the Russian Empire did a survey of the inhabitants of Vilnius in the early 20th century, the number of Lithuanians in the old capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania made up a percentage in the single digits, greatly outweighed by the Russians, Poles, and, most importantly, Jews, who had made Vilna a center of commerce, learning, and Russian Imperial government activity.

In fact, in an irony that for me never grows tiresome, among the very same secret protocols agreed to by the Third Reich and the USSR that bound Lithuania’s fate to the Soviets sits the article that returned Vilnius to the Lithuanians. It is only since (and because of) the Soviet era, then, that Vilnius has become a Lithuanian capital that also features a majority-Lithuanian population.

The five languages of Vilnius. (click to enlarge)

What this means, to make it perfectly obvious, is that Vilnius has always been, definitionally, a city of outsiders, of foreigners, of others, a fact made clear as day in Briedis’ Vilnius: City of Strangers. It is a city of five native tongues, as the welcome sign to the Republic of Užupis reminds us. It is a city where Bakhtin lived as a teenager and where, if you believe his biographers, he got the idea of разноречие, or, as it’s translated into “English,” heteroglossia. But eventually the otherness gives way, and Vilnius becomes Vilna. How could the Jewish plurality in the city feel like their rights to the city were somehow different than those of the speck-sized Lithuanian minority?

Another way: at some point Jewish St. stops being a marker for where the Jewish others all live and becomes, instead, the center of Vilna, a street at the end of which stands the Great Synagogue, a shining keystone of Judaism for centuries. At some point, we no longer talk about Jewish St., but start to speak of the Jewish district, and then about Jewish Vilna, and then, even, about the Ghetto Wilna, the first of which included, of course, that very same Jewish St.

But let’s leave geography for a moment and talk about that old cavil of mine, dual citizenship. The Republic of Lithuania’s Constitution categorically bans dual citizenship except under (what has been interpreted as) rare circumstances. This means that the 10% or so of Lithuania living abroad (the unspoken neoliberal heroes who make austerity look like it works) cannot become citizens of their new homes without renouncing their Lithuanian citizenship. The “rare” circumstances include granting dual citizenship to those who fled Soviet Lithuania and established themselves in diaspora. The Lithuanian-Americans with shiny, blue US passports, because they fled the Soviets, deserve dual citizenship, in the eyes of the Republic.

The Jews who fled the mounting anti-Semitism that followed in the wake of the anti-communist 1926 coup d’état, that is, the Jews who felt that Eastern Europe was not a good place to be in the 1930s, however, have no such right.³ Even though the Lithuanian Republic itself was aligning against them, they have no recourse to reclaim Lithuanian citizenship (without renouncing their current citizenship). If this seems unfair, well, it should. As more than one Lithuanian has told me, part of the dual citizenship ban is to, simply put, keep Jews out.⁴ Jews fled under the authoritarian Smetona regime. But good, Catholic, bourgeois Lithuanians (like my grandparents) stayed and only fled the Soviets. So although the new Republic is cast in the same pluralist spirit as the original Republic was, where it’s unconstitutional to discriminate based on race, religion, or ethnicity, it’s clear whom the Lithuanian state wants back.⁵

Still, the dual citizenship argument is important to restate here. Current Lithuanian politicians, despite the ruling from the Constitutional Court that the dual citizenship ban can only be repealed by referendum, keep pretending that they can pass new laws that will make it easier for the new diaspora to maintain their Lithuanian citizenship. That is, the unconstitutionality of their policy does not deter their advocating it to their constituents.

The neoliberal look of Vilnius. (click for original)

Which brings me to the new political storm in Lithuania regarding her relationship with the outside world. Despite the neoliberal playground that is Mayor Artūras Zuokas’s Vilnius, with skyscrapers built on the banks of the Neris river by Scandinavian and English banks, a growing movement, now even supported by the Lithuanian Speaker of Parliament, has been calling for a binding referendum that would ban the sale of land to foreigners.

Despite the fact that the ban seems stupidly, obviously contrary to the (same neoliberal) tenets of the European Union, the movement has gathered something close to the 300,000 signatures needed to call for a vote, and the proponents of the referendum have been vocal about how this is a move to save what is Lithuanian about Lithuania: her agricultural land (a matter for the state) and cultural heritage (a matter for the ethnic group with little currency in matters of state).

A glance at zemesvardu.lt (“on behalf of the land,” more or less), a website of the pro-referendum movement, shows it colored from top to bottom in Lithuanian nationalist (not statist) attributes, from misappropriated pagan symbols to paranoid concern over the encroachment of the EU in the addition of a blue band to the Lithuanian flag in another organization’s pro-EU marketing materials. The rotating banner (that takes forever to load) demands that you “Sign for Lithuania,” that your (pagan) “inner oak tree awaken.” It alerts you that the first Lithuanian words to be heard in the cosmos will be “Lithuania’s land is not a commodity.” And then it reminds you of the opening lines of the Lithuanian National Anthem.

So how, then, to read the aims of these feel-good patriots when, coming home last night, I saw a sticker of the pro-referendum movement covering the street sign for Jewish St.?⁶

How can this be anything other than an anti-Semitic provocation, a call that Jews, who have been part of the social, political, cultural, and economic fabric of Lithuania as long as there has even been such a thing as Lithuania, are now again foreigners with no right to the city, to the land?

With this one eager gesture (jumping up to a street sign about 3m above street level), a pro-referendum activist has performed the quick twist from pride to anti-Semitic chauvinism. Suddenly, the pagan symbol coupling the urging of the awakening of your inner oak tree (as it were) looks more like a Hakenkreuz. Suddenly, the euroskeptical fanatics’ concern over selling land to foreigners begins to sound like a paranoia over selling their agricultural patrimony land to the Jews. Having denied Jews dual citizenship, the state is now being called to act anti-Semitically again in denying them the right to own property. Brilliant.

1. A note on translation: street names referring to groups of people are given as genitive plurals in Lithuanian, so Mėsininkų g. is correctly translated as Butchers’ St. To me, that sounds unidiomatic, so I use either a singular nominative or adjective throughout.
2. In comparison, the teeny Tatar and Muslim minority in Vilnius established itself in the port suburb of Lukiškės, which is now the site of the Lithuanian Parliament and comfortably part of Centras, or the central district of Vilnius. Their trace is kept alive in the names Mečetės g. (Mosque St.) and Totorių g. (Tatar St.), which is in the northern part of the Old Town.
3. A brief synopsis of Eidintas’s chapter on Jewish/Lithuanian relations before the Holocaust: the first republic (of 1918) was imagined as a multi-ethnic state, a Switzerland of Eastern Europe where Jews would enjoy greater rights than anywhere else in Europe. Part of this was tactical: Lithuanian nationalists promised their Jewish compatriots the world in order for the Jews to back Lithuanian claims on Vilnius, which was part of Poland at the time. Once the Vilnius question was settled in Poland’s favor, the state grew more ethnically nationalist, pushing even conservative Jews to the Lithuanian left-wing and, ultimately, communist party, whose membership in the 1930s was fully 50% Jewish. Though the Jewish community quickly assimilated—despite having never learned Lithuanian, parents sent their kids to Jewish schools where the children learned it—once ethnic nationalism became a goal of the state, things began to get tight. The state encouraged non-Lithuanians to emigrate (which put them in line with Zionists, ironically), and as Nazism grew popular next door (and in Klaipėda), anti-Semitic violent outbreaks also grew. So though the government was never anti-Semitic as a matter of policy per se, its eager nationalism had anti-Semitic consequences felt by those who subsequently chose to flee.
4. And Russians, to be fair. One Lithuanian conspiracy theory holds that if dual citizenship is permitted, every Russian in Lithuania will take on Russian citizenship, prompting an invasion from Russia to protect its citizens in Lithuania.
5. The First Republic gave blanket citizenship to all residents of Lithuania except functionaries of the Russian Empire with no concern to ethnic or religious background. The current Republic asserts that it is the tauta—the people—that is sovereign. The Constitutional Court has ruled that this tauta is made up of Lithuanian citizens, not ethnic Lithuanians, thereby removing the question of ethnicity from the makeup of the body politic.
6. In a twist regarding the political fight, the issue at hand is not, first, over the sale of land to foreigners, but, rather, about asserting the right to a binding referendum in the first place… which can then be used to ban the sale of land to foreigners.

Despite its inhospitability toward them—demonstrated daily by pervasive car culture, sudden and unfenced holes in the middle of sidewalks providing basement access to buildings, uneven and bad paving—Vilnius is a city infested by pedestrians. I use “infested” here because in no other city in which I have lived (which means I am wary of saying Vilnius is unique in this way) have pedestrians managed to work their way into every fissure in the city’s fabric, exploiting every open area to leave behind a footpath for the next pedestrian.

Alongside Geležinio vilko gatvė, the city’s version of the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago or the Henry Hudson Parkway in New York in how it ferries travelers from the city’s center to its northern reaches, run footpaths in both directions, sometimes coming within only a yard or so of cars zipping by at 100 kph. If pedestrians are willing to walk that close to only mostly controlled projectiles beating their weights by more than an order of magnitude, it’s a safe bet that there’s nearly nowhere they won’t go.

Perhaps part of the free reign pedestrians enjoy is due to the remarkable lack of density in Vilnius. Forests abound, and when we marched 19km through the city for charity, we spent so much time not in view of buildings or any other settlement that it became a bit of a joke, as noted in the photos. Why go out of your way to walk along a street from Fabijoniškės to Akropolis, when you can just cut through the woods? The footpaths crisscross any open space, much like the diagonal paths across empty lots in Chicago’s South and West Sides, a steady refrain of everyday urban practice in harmonic counterpoint to the rhythm of the Green Line’s tottering from Oak Park to Hyde Park.

These shortcuts reveal as well the clandestine subcultures of Vilnius’s youth and poor. Wherever a bushier collection of trees meets the footpath, inside one will find crushed, empty two-liter bottles of beer, crumpled cigarette packets, and even sometimes indications of more permanent habitation, in the form of wads of toilet paper. Much like “the spool” in high school was the secret location in the Sanctuary where people met to smoke cigarettes or flaunt even more of the school’s rules, these little partyplaces are stupidly easy to find, advertising their availability for secret activity, though they do not advertise too much to attract too much attention.

But the pedestrian control of the city’s topography is also a response to the sometimes laughable lack of, well, basically streets at all. Outside the center, the satellite cities built to accommodate the typically carless population that poured into the capital of the Lithuanian SSR often feature just a handful of streets running in loops to connect minimally the high-rise apartments to the street grid but not much else. It’s up to pedestrians to confront this minimal connection by striking out and making their own routes into the city when a car is not available. Doing so allows for the analysis, in de Certeau’s words, of the “microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay.” The pedestrians in Vilnius are part of a “proliferating illegitimacy” that the city cannot stop. Or at least shows no interest in stopping, as it feels like the only signs in the city that serve as interdictions for pedestrians are in the Bernardinų Sodas, which replaced the unruly but enchanting Sereikiškių Parkas with a tightly sculpted garden serving as a kitsch monument to, first, the city’s priorities in times of economic crisis and, second, the city’s fealty to the Catholic Church. Where once stood ancient oaks full of secrets about the pagan past of Vilnius now stands a sad imitation of the Jardin des Plantes, a place so busy telling you it’s a park it doesn’t take a breath to relaxingly show you it’s a park.

The lack of streets in Žirmūnai, the most populous neighborhood of the city, led me to challenge myself once. Instead of walking along streets from one friend’s apartment on Žygio gatvė to another’s on Tuskulėnų gatvė (2.7km by car) as I had several times before, I decided I’d take only pedestrian routes unaligned with streets: official, sanctioned, paved paths or paths following local custom. Some challenge. The walk was about half as long, and the route was more or less direct. But the ready availability of these routes points to how giant apartment buildings can be shoved over 100m from a city street, served by a narrow access road always choking on the too many cars parked on both sides. But parking innovation in Vilnius is a story for another time…

Inside the city center, where streets are likely to be at least 100 years old, their comparative preponderance initiates a new set of rules, challenges, and folk competition. Of course, the clandestine bowers where teenagers meet to smoke and drink exist even in the city center. And unpaved footpaths cut across nearly every strip of green. But in the center, the shortcut takes a different form, as a way of navigating the Senamiestis courtyards.

“Do you know about this shortcut?” the companion asks as we walk into a courtyard through a narrow passageway I’d passed numerous times before. From the tone, I can tell that the hoped for answer is “no,” thereby granting the companion the pleasure of sharing something new with me and of showing intimate knowledge of the city. And usually the honest answer is “no”; after all, I’ve only lived here just over a year.

A courtyard with two (or more!) entrances is a hub in the Vilnius topography, a way for pedestrians to get off the grid or, simply, to get places more quickly, more directly. Unlike the courtyards in Paris, completely hidden from view by locked gates with flashing signs warning of the possibility of cars’ barreling through, the courtyards in Vilnius teem with their own stories, triggering the desire to visit them all just to hear the tales before privatization’s creep closes them off like their Parisian counterparts. Shops hidden from view (a massage parlor sits at the back of the courtyard I currently live in, shoved some 100m away from the street, an isolation only partly mollified by the myriad signs promising its presence at street level), rock clubs underground in more ways than one (the old Satta, which is now becoming the new home of Trip, is accessible only by alleys and footpaths), more socializing of the clandestine (the half liter of vodka passed quickly around in a circle not far from the puddle of urine left by the previous circle) and more innocent (a postcard I once found asked worried parents if their children had learned new, impolite vulgarities while playing in the courtyard) variety give each courtyard its own character. Romain Gary writes about the frustrations of unrequited love available to a young boy in Russian Vilnius among the stockpile of firewood in the middle of his courtyard on ulica Pogulianskaja…

So, in any case, these sketched ideas on writing the city by walking it were occasioned by a bunch of recent events, but I want to close this with one, where I wonder what’s the fastest, most direct way for me to walk from my new apartment to the bar where I most often go to meet with friends. At my previous apartment, the bar was literally down the street—a fact taken into consideration when choosing the apartment—so spatial tactical energy gave way to other concerns. But a new apartment means a new route means a new challenge means a new story.

I never even thought to ask Google Maps for the route, assuming that my spatial knowledge of shortcuts through courtyards would trump anything the Mountain View robots could possibly know, an everyday practice invisible to their distance measuring algorithms. And I further assumed, then, that the fastest route would necessarily take me through the Žydų gatvė courtyard between Vokiečių gatvė and Stiklių gatvė, the heart of Jewish Vilna, past the traces of the silenced Great Synagogue. One of the first courtyards I ever explored in the city, with at least seven entrances, this area serves as my link to most points west of the apartment.

But uncertainty of my own spatial mastery led me to try and derive a solution that would be both quantitatively (measured distance) and qualitatively (using my own practice) satisfying. Which two entrances into the courtyard should I use to cut across most efficiently, I wondered, and so I finally reached for the map. My plan was simple: draw a straight line from the (only) entrance to my own courtyard to the bar, then add anchors that warp the line to account for the interdictive strategies of the city as well as the blocking markers from the lives of other people (their homes, for instance).

The experiment revealed my utter, utter lack of listening to the city as it chided me for my arrogant insistence on the superiority of the courtyard shortcut. By cutting through the Synagogue’s courtyard, I was adding hundreds of meters to my trip! The city had already literally paved the shortest path for me, along Šv. Ignoto gatvė. The only way there could be a more direct route from my apartment were if my own courtyard had a second entrance in the back, dumping me straight onto Gaono gatvė on the way to Šv. Ignoto, because the current shortest path requires a quick trip in a southwest direction though the bar is northwest of me.

Direct route (black) and (incorrectly) presumed shortest route (blue).

Even this shortest route has its own narrative treats, leading me through the old Jewish center that has been rebuilt into the glitziest corner of the city center, up the deadly (because cars like to race down it) silent (because of the large abandoned monastery to the west) Šv. Ignoto gatvė, through the parking lot next to the crumbling ruins of the Radziwiłł Palace, a parking lot that, because of its own comical neglect of lighting, invites its own clandestine behavior often featuring the spillover from the nightlife surrounding the intersection of Islandijos gatvė and Vilniaus gatvė.

The city never ends up being written, and my walking will continue to make possibilities emerge throughout Vilnius, an infinite task made more infinite by this city’s peculiar invitations to pedestrians, inviting them to explore, to experiment, and, most importantly, to create.

And though my writing sample has merely one figure (a histogram of the distribution of the word “uniform” throughout the U.S.A. trilogy by Dos Passos), GIS plays a larger role in another chapter, “‘Think of Montana. I Can’t. Think of Madrid. I Can’t. Think of a Cool Drink of Water. All Right‘: The Realism of For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Luckily, that data is in rather a clean enough format that I can make a post out of it here.

The genesis of the argument of the chapter came from two reactions I had to the geography of Hemingway’s novel. First, though all the action takes place in the mountains outside Madrid, Robert Jordan spends a lot of time talking about the American West. He fantasizes about it, he draws parallels between Spain and the U.S., and so on. Second, it seemed like Jordan talked about many different corners of Spain either when thinking to himself or when talking to the other partisans. It may be a cliché, but Spain is well known for the “patria chica.” Yet Jordan’s geographical coverage of the nation suggested that he was geographically unifying it into an entity that did not exist while the country was torn in two by the Spanish Civil War.

So I jotted down every place that is mentioned in the novel. 150 unique places get mentioned a total of 519 times, giving just over one geographical observation per page of novel.² I then pared down the data further, looking only for cities, towns, or buildings. This meant that I eliminated references to, say, “Spain” or “Estremadura [sic].”³ Cities and smaller make up 101 of the 150 unique places. I then used a lot of persistence to hunt down coordinates for each of these 101 places.⁴

Next, I separated the observations into three heteroglottic categories: places which were part of the discursive site of the plot itself, places which were part of the discursive site of the conversations between the partisans, and places which were part of the discursive site of Jordan’s interior monologues. Places that came up in the monologues of others got tossed out. For the chapter, I then limited everything to Spain. But for this post, I’ve added those other monologues and places outside Spain back in:

View map on GeoCommons

It looks pretty, but there’s not a lot to it that strikes me initially as super analytically useful. Things get interesting when the set is limited to Spain, which is why I chose to do so in my chapter. There, it’s clear that Jordan thinks about lots of different places in Spain (more than what comes up in discussion), but keeps coming back to Madrid. For the chapter, I did a nearest neighbor analysis, weighted by how many times a place gets mentioned, and the Madrid-centric nature of Jordan’s thoughts undid the way his mind wandered. Madrid is just a giant attractor for that guy. His thoughts take up the most area in Spain, but have the smallest average nearest neighbor distance, suggesting astounding clustering around Madrid and Gaylord’s inside the city.

This dataset could be enhanced in the future by giving a bit more detail for the dialogue (which characters mentioned which places), and as a project, it would certainly benefit from having the text available alongside each observation. Furthermore, it might be useful to show the flow in the narrative of all these observations by remapping it based on page number, so that it would be possible to see which places are mentioned when in the discursive time of the story. I could do that now, but I don’t think it would be very useful without the textual snippets accompanying each observation.

And so this is the kind of DH I do, boxed up inside the literary object. It tends to ask questions more than answer them, and it introduces arguments that build on the peculiarities DH presents. For example, in this Hemingway chapter, I make sense of these geographical distributions by considering Robert Jordan as “pan-Spaniard” republican who will, along with Maria and their child, create a new Spain (and US) full of pure-bred republicans. It’s a very weird novel Hemingway wrote, and the reading I end up with is only possible because of ideas sparked by these initial plottings made with a GIS.

1. Right, you can tell there’s another post on this in the future, yeah? The short version is that mapping stuff is a question-begging move, since, many argue, it implies ahead of time a Cartesian epistemological commitment. Add in GIS’s history of military-industrial use, and things get messy. I gave a quick description of the beginning of this post back in 2011.
2. In contrast, U.S.A. has between 2.7 and 6.6 observations per page and Native Son has between 0.2 and 0.9 observations per page. Both were calculated at 95% confidence.
3. Hemingway’s inconsistent use of Spanish and English toponyms for places in Spain is kind of bewildering considering his reputation as believing the text would be fundamentally altered by changing even one word.
4. Most yielded rather easily to even the most basic gazetteer, but some places in Madrid required a bit of historical digging. I’m most proud of finding the alpine club where Jordan spent the night before meeting the partisans. Apparently, it burned down in 2002. Furthermore, Hemingway got place names wrong from time to time, either forgetting parts of names or even adding extra to names. The chapter has a huge appendix devoted to the challenges presented by “geocoding” the novel by hand. I can’t imagine a geoparser would have done a better job, either.