Although life has been much of a whirlwind lately, what the digital world has had to offer has been remarkable in terms of the positive impact it has made. This week, we learned a tool that helps us map a text. What does mapping a text mean you may ask? Simply, mapping a literature text means visually putting all distinctive locations of that text on a map. While there are so many tools to map a novel, we focused on using Googlemymaps. In this blog we will discuss our journey to map the life achievements of three authors; Charles Dickens, Jane Austin, Edith Wharton, and their novels Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice and House of mirth, respectively.
In order to map a text, you will need the important locations mentioned in a text. This is where our professor suggested Topo text, a digital tool that can extract locations from a novel into an excel sheet so it can be imported onto Googlemymaps. However, downloading topo text was a hassle. Firstly, we went on topo text website, downloaded the application, then we needed to download another application that supports topo text called “Breezipp”. After installing “Breezipp” we tried to access topo text however an error message popped up. We did not know what to do and it was a Saturday therefore we did not want to annoy our professor on a weekend. Hence, my colleague Mohamad called his friend from another group named Bob Issa and asked for his help. Bob advised us to dump topo text as he already tried working on it and the application always crashed and did not give him any results. Taking Bob’s advice, we moved on and tried mapping the texts manually and this is how it went.
To begin with, we started digging for information on our candidates from all sorts of websites such as Wikipedia, google and Enotes and the plain text format of the novels. Secondly, we fired up GoogleMymaps. Each member of the group handled one author. In order to have clear visuals, we mapped each author with his respective novel on a separate map.
Here’s what we got for Charles Dickens:
Charles Dickens, the author of Great expectations, faced various many struggles in his early life. Indeed, his family encountered financial difficulties. In addition, Charles Dickens described himself as a “very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy”. Nonetheless, Charles Dickens read a lot of books such as the works of Tobias Smollet. We could hypothesize that his thorough readings might have contributed to his writing style. A major milestone in his life was when he had to move to London with his family and his father got imprisoned due to increasing debts. Later, he had to stop school to work in a warehouse to support his family. During his time there, he witnessed the poor environment in which some people lived and this might have influenced the settings and the characters he chose for his novels. Other notable achievements include his claim that for at least three years he attended the theatre. We might also hypothesize here that this might have influenced his writing style. It is also said that some of his characters were inspired from one of his lovers such as Maria Beadnell who supposedly inspired him for Dora in the novel David Copperfield. He later undertook a career in journalism and that is when popular novels of his started appearing. However, what we learned the most after mapping this author’s life, is that sometimes an author has to experience an environment in order to understand it well and write vividly about it. Indeed, we believe that the fact that he had to work in a warehouse when his father got imprisoned and that he lived in a poor neighborhood before he moved to London influenced his choice of the story elements of Great Expectations. Thus, we could conclude that it is the environment in which Charles Dickens lived that impacted him and allowed him to write with precision and vitality the story of Pip and how he lived in a poor entourage before receiving his fortune.
Moving on to the mapping of Charles Dickens’s novel, we proceeded in the following way: we focused first on one layer which illustrates with precision the journey of Pip, Great Expectations’ main character. The other layer focused on the level of corruption of Pip by money. We chose this aspect as our second layer since it related well to one of our main research questions of the project: how money influences the morality of people who possess it. In our map, the color red indicates a high level of corruption by money while the green color represents an almost absence of corruption by money and the gradation of colors in between indicate intermediate levels of corruption by money. Also, we were able to describe some of the emotions felt by Pip at different stages of the story in the same layer. Mapping Great Expectations helped us focus much more on the settings of the story. While we only viewed Kent and London as mere places in the story, we started noticing the contrast between both of them. Kent is where Pip starts out in a poor family but when he receives a fortune form an anonymous source, he travels to London which is where he manifests his acquired wealth. On the other hand, we also noticed that Satis House is where we encounter the main problem of the story, and also where it ends. Further, we were able to observe the level of corruption of Pip by money as he moves from one location to the other. It is at its highest once he gets to London and it is seen in the attitude he adopts with Joe when he later meets him again in the story. It is worth noting that Pip’s level of corruption by money increases throughout the novel up to a certain level and then goes back down. An interesting point is that Pip’s level of corruption by money starts to increase once he meets Estella at Satis House and almost ends when he meets her again at Satis House at the end of the novel. In addition, mapping the text made it look more ‘’true’’ than when it is read since we describe the events and mark them as locations on the atlas, giving the impression that the story really happened..
Jane Austen was born in Steventon in the year 1775 on the 16th of December. The atmosphere as Austen’s home was described is ‘’open, amused, easy intellectual one’’. We also know that during some evenings she read aloud novels with her family, some of which she had composed herself. This might have contributed to Jane Austen’s style of writing. Also, during her teenage years she wrote three short plays. During these same years, she also compiled Juvenilia which consists of twenty-nine works. She did all of this before even reaching her twenties. Later on, her family moved to Bath, which bothered Jane Austen since she was very attached to her home at Steventon. Consequently, she felt depressed and could not write as much as before. Then, she went back to Basingstoke where she received a marriage proposal which she eventually declined. She then went on with writing many more famous novels such as Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility. At the time, women had to have a male relative to represent them when published in their name, and thus Jane Austen had to be published anonymously. However, this did not stand in the way of her novels becoming very famous. She even received an invitation from Prince Regent who was an admirer of her novels. In the case of Jane Austen, mapping her life has helped us understand more the possible roots of her talent and fame. She was close to literature form a very early age and she wrote many novels in her teenage years.
Regarding Pride and Prejudice, we also mapped the novel in the form of two layers. The first layer consisted of the main locations of the story. Among them, we can observe Pemberley, Longbourn which are located in England. For each location in the first layer, we simply stated their role in the novel but not which events take place in those locations. For our second layer, we outlined the major events of the story and indicated at some points how they related to our theme of money and power. The question to which we could answer effectively was the second: how does money affect the morality of people? In some of the events, we can observe a few marriages which are based solely on money such as the marriage between Wickham and Lydia. Indeed, Jane Austen’s plot reflects the dependence of women on marriage in the quest for social standing and financial security. Mapping “Pride and Prejudice” helped us also discover some locations of Great Britain through the various events of the novel. Moreover, the setting in which the Bennets live is rather small. They did not get the chance to fully experience the world around them. This might serve as a reason to why they only look for money as a decisive factor for marriage, because their lifestyle and way of thinking might be restricted. However, Jane Austen demonstrates that dramatic events can still happen even in a restricted and unexciting place. On the other hand, mapping the script made it closer to reality and more relatable. Jane Austen, who is British, was able to reproduce her experience in the cities she has visited during her lifetime into believable and relevant events through her writing.
After mapping Edith Wharton’s life, we were able to discover a lot on Edith. Edith was born and raised on 14&23rd St. New York city, and shortly afterwards Edith got baptized in Grace church also located in New York city. Edith came from a rich family called “The Joneses”. In fact, her family was so rich that people came up with the saying “Keeping up with the Joneses”, a phrase still used to this day and has a famous Hollywood movie casted by known actors such as Isla Fisher, Gal Gadot, Zach Galifianakis, and Jon Hamm. In 1868, her family traveled to Europe where they lived in Rome for 1 year, moved to Spain, and finally settled in Florence. Due to her living abroad experience, Edith developed a love for arts and writing. After getting married in the trinity Chapel in New York, Wharton continued writing and wrote her way to Pulitzer in 1920, the first woman ever to win a Pulitzer Prize presented by the university of Columbia in New York. After a historic life full of achievements Edith Wharton passed away in August 11th, 1937. However, she was buried in France in the “Cimitiere des Gonards”, a far place from what she called home. After her death in ’37, on the 76th Hall street near the University of Columbia, the female writer was admitted in the women’s hall of fame as one of the greatest novelists that lived.
A final result of the ‘House of Mirth’ map gave us a clearer, more realistic, and exciting view of the novel. Now, we were able to connect the dots and visualize how the events took place in time and space. We can notice that all major events of the story happened in one block of the big apple, precisely between the 5th and 6th avenue, such events are how Lilly Bart, the main character of the story met Lawrence Selden, and how after major turnover in the novel, Lilly always went to 5thAvenue to wonder and clear her mind off things etc. Moreover, after mapping the life of Edith Wharton we can maybe now relate why she chose this setting. Edith’s childhood home was placed near the 5th avenue, and it could have been that she chose the avenue because she knew it by heart, which allowed her to feel the setting while writing the novel. The map appeared to be more accurate than the text as it was much easier to pinpoint the different locations that contributed towards the setting, compared to a relatively long text. Hence making it simpler to understand the specific elements that the setting encompasses such as the time, mood, location, and culture. Mapping Wharton’s achievements and works gave us a better insight on who she was as an author according to her accomplishments in writings that included topics such as social status, marriage, and money, just to name a few. This completely reshaped the way we viewed her as we learned more about what milestones she has reached and how much of a respected individual she has become in her community.
Exploring GoogleMyMaps has been a very positive experience overall. To begin with, the tutorial on YouTube was extremely helpful. In just fifteen minutes it explained to us almost all there is to know about this tool, starting from how to name our first layer to how to draw roads between two different markers. In addition, My maps is user friendly and customizable, where you can add photos, change markers and icons, and navigate through colors. We did not encounter many inconveniences, although drawing a road between two locations was a bit tiresome when the locations were far apart. However, the hard part was not using Mymaps, but rather gathering the information needed to map as websites did not offer enough details. Moreover, regarding the life achievements of the authors, you can rarely find the specific location of where something happened. Achievements are more often referred to by dates instead of places i.e. if someone won an Oscar, the websites states when he won it and what for, but not on which stage he received the prize.
In conclusion, mapping a text is not always as easy especially when we want to represent the story efficiently but also without including too many details. Nonetheless, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages as mapping allowed the story to make more sense as it sets the mood of the novel and helps us relate the plot to the settings well. From the authors’ perspective, it gave us a more thorough knowledge about their life achievements. Moreover, we discovered that mapping an author’s life can draw a connection between the author and his/her novels which assists us in gaining a better understanding on why certain places and timings were chosen for the events of his/her novel. Of course, it is thanks to GoogleMyMaps which allowed us to engage in this interesting distant reading of the novels.
MAHA'S WORLD 