Cultural Mapping and the Digital Sphere: Place and Space ed. by Ruth Panofsky, Kathleen Kellett (review)

This is an important book which both demystifies and challenges in its accounts of research possibilities in the field of digital humanities. The 14 essays here, which are the product of a conference at Ryerson University organised by the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) at the University of Alberta, highlight the ‘digital turn’ which is transforming humanities scholarship in a variety of ways: in research methodologies, in forms of communication and publishing, and in the online management of libraries and archives. Interestingly, this two-part collection brings together seven cutting-edge digital humanities projects and seven traditional individual research projects, inviting readers to look at the relationship between these two very different kinds of research practice which coexist in the scholarly community.

The essays in part I, ‘Place and the Digital Frontier’, deal with large-scale collaborative projects like Editing Modernism in Canada, or Orlando: a history of women’s writing in the British Isles, where massive amounts of data need to be organised electronically for web publication. ‘Mapping Tags and Tagging Maps’ describes the CWRC’s team’s experiments with various electronic mapping tools, a reminder not only of the steep learning curve for literary scholars wishing to engage with digital projects, but also of the need for technical expertise and institutional structures that support these projects. And ‘collaboration’ itself needs to be regulated according to principles of good practice, as Paul Hjartarson and his colleagues explain in ‘Modelling Collaboration’. An impressive range of innovative projects includes the computerised Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) which initiates a new kind of theatre history creating performance histories to supplement print-based records, and ‘Edmonton Pipelines: Living and Playing in the Digital City’, a project which superimposes interactive historical and contemporary digital maps to illustrate how the city is a dynamic construct that changes over time. Faye Hammill’s ‘Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture in Canada 1925–1960’ is mentioned as ‘the most ambitious of CWRC’s pilot projects’(p. 5) for its investigation of middlebrow magazine culture and changing patterns of leisure travel in the modernist era. The website with its digital maps and interactive timelines plus the book by Hammill and Michelle Smith (reviewed in BJCS 29:1) demonstrate the linkage between online research technology and print publication.

The essays in part II, ‘Writers and Readers: Mapping Textual Space’ (in English and French), are examples of non-digital humanities scholarship in its varied critical approaches, from traditional literary analysis, to different modes of translation, to odd insights into cultural history. Cecily Devereux’s ‘Salomania’ considers the manufacture of celebrity in the pre-digital age via the technology of postcards, where she discusses the fame of Canadian-born artist Maud Allan and her Salome dance, popularised in the early 1900s by the wide distribution of her image on postcards. This section ends with Margaret Mackey’s investigation of non-academic reading practices, as she speculates on the possibility of digital mapping to record individual readers’ responses. Her essay might be taken as the signature for this collection, which provokes us to rethink many of our print-based assumptions about literature and culture.