My response to this question begins with my initial foray into the GIS world as an English Ph.D. candidate working on narrative structures and the 19^th-century American city novel.  At the beginning of fall semester, I signed up for an ArcGIS class, offered through the Geography Department, in order to learn the necessary skills for a digital project I’ve wanted to complete for some time now: mapping a nineteenth-century American author's trip abroad from 1839-1840. After researching other DH map projects, I embarked on this project with two central research questions: How would mapping Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s travels reveal the way she (and to a greater extent antebellum America) imagined Europe? And, within those “Old World” cities, what spaces does she spend time writing about (for example, in London, she draws a lengthy comparison between London’s parks and New York’s boulevards)?

I’ve spent the last few months compiling data for my Arc GIS map, and I’ve been particularly struck by the way my reading focus and analytic strategies have changed as I attempt to “mine” this text for data.  I realized that during my first reading of Sedgwick's Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841), I paid close attention to her impressions and descriptions of the social and literary circles in which she moved while on the continent. However, now using the digital version of this text on Google Books to track her trip from city to village to historic site, etc., I'm forced to consider this narrative in several new ways so as to more effectively organize my data for a digital map that will give significance to both the historical timeline of the trip and the narrative space she devotes to different stops along the way.  

For example, the letters are sometimes dated inconsistently, and while a four-day journey may be described in a single paragraph, an afternoon excursion down the Rhine in a steamer may be described over several pages--changing the representation of narrative spatial time. As a result, I’ve been wrestling with new research questions such as how to convey, through a digital map, that greater physical distance traveled may actually occupy very little space, or text-time in the narrative itself. As well, place-names take on far greater importance in the text now than they did before.  As I attempt to locate the exact longitude and latitude position of 19th-century hotels (some no longer in existence), I rely on Sedgwick’s description of city sites visible from her rooms (and mentions of these hotels in other 19th-century travel narratives) in order to approximate a location within the city.  

I believe digital media and narrative studies can intersect in interesting and exciting ways, but, at the same time, I don’t necessarily know what these different intersections look like.  More importantly, I’m still learning how these digital tools can change not only the way we read and digest narratives, but what we perceive to be the narrative(s) of a particular text.  I hope through this project I can discover even more ways to represent and imagine narratives with the help of digital tools.  I’m really interested in how others have experimented with incorporating narratology and spatial studies in their own projects. In particular, how have digital tools or technologies changed the way you read narratives; and how have you effectively researched and presented narratives through these kinds of tools and technologies? 

Image on front page by Eric Fischer and available on Flickr.