Letters from Spain in a Space-time Box: Historical GIS with Timestamped Itineraries for Understanding the Chronotopes of Nineteenth-century Travel Writing. Issue 1 (March 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Afinoguénova, Eugenia; Appel, Stephen; Ballard, Andrea; McGowan, Mackenzi
• Is Part Of: International journal of humanities and arts computing. Volume 14:Issue 1/2(2020)
• Page Start: 119
• Page End: 133
• Publication Date: 2020-03
• Subjects: Spain (1789–1914) -- travel literature -- chronotopes -- timestamped GIS -- historical maps -- gazetteer -- mapping imprecise information; Humanities -- Data processing -- Periodicals; Arts -- Data processing -- Periodicals; 001.30285
• DOI: 10.3366/ijhac.2020.0248
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1753-8548

Abstract

Abstract : This article documents the use of historical GIS with timestamped itineraries to better understand a large multilingual corpus of nineteenth-century travelogues about Spain and their diverse 'chronotopes' (meaningful intersections of space and time in a narrative, as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin), which remain unnoticeable when one reads travelogues as traditional literary texts. The authors offer a rationale for using historical maps and GIS with timestamps, discuss the challenges posed by a multilingual historical dataset with partially imprecise or inferred information, and share their approach to overcoming these challenges in data collection, the creation of gazetteer, and timecoding. Despite focusing on travelogues, these tools and approaches are transferable to the visualisation and analysis of other texts in which chronotopes matter.