Letters from Spain in a space-time box: historical GIS with timestamped itineraries for understanding the chronotopes of 19th-century travel writing
Date:
Eugenia Afinoguenova, Marquette University; Andrea Ballard, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Stephen Appel, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Chris Larkee, Marquette University
Early tourists were not necessarily good at describing places. Prior to setting off, they would read guidebooks and narratives written by earlier travelers; they would sometimes cut out paragraphs from other books and glue them into a scrapbook leaving spaces in between for their own descriptions and sketches (Schulz-Forberg 2005). In nineteenth-century travel literature, each mention of place was thus related, not only to physical space, but also to other texts. Describing places was inseparable from writing about the fast-developing means of mobility used to get there. Men and women traveled, but the gender of the narrator was neatly correlated to the expectations of potential readers, since travelogues were a highly commercial genre. The descriptions of space were also closely related to time, be it the time of history, the linear timeline of progress, or the circularity of agrarian cycles of seasons and celebrations.
Approaching travelogues as if they were hypertexts of the pre-digital age, with each mention of place or tourist attraction related, not just to their physical referents, but also to other texts, available maps, transportation schedules, and so on, the Spanish Travelers Project (spanishtravelers.com) examines the interplay between texts, mobility, gender and time, on the one hand, and the authoritative perceptions of space in the form of historical maps, on the other.
Our research questions are the following:
Is there any correlation between the means of mobility—horses, donkeys, shared horse-driven carriages, walking, trains, sailboats, and steamers– available to 19th century travelers, on the one hand, and the repertory of destinations that they visited?
How did different types of mobility affect, not only the timelines of travels, but also the ways in which these timelines were narrated in travel literature?
How, if at all, did the gender and the country of origin of the writers and the travelers affect the timelines and the destinations of their travels and the ways in which these were described?
To answer these questions, the project team is using GIS and 3D “space-time cube” modeling (Kraak, 2014) to visualize what, following the literature theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1975), we call “chronotopes” of travel literature– the interdependence of the formal elements related to narrative time and space. The project will offer an interactive map of itineraries from multiple travelogues about Spain written in different languages, by female and male authors, before and after the 1860s boom of railway tourism in Spain.