Close Reading Comparison

CLOSE READING COMPARISON

"Dire Cartographies"

"Spatial humanities"

Demonstration of Flow in the Beginning and Middle of "Dire Cartographies," Along with My Analyses of It:

Atwood begins by stating what the paper is about: "This essay is about literary utopias and dystopias, and how it came to pass that I found myself writing about them, and then—many years later—attempting something in that form myself."
- This paper, as Atwood says, "is about literary utopias and dystopias," not about maps, despite the title including a word related to "maps," "cartographies," in it.

She discusses the important of the word "cartography:" "Cartography is map-drawing, and the brain is, among other things, a map-making entity."

Atwood proceeds to provide examples of historical uses of maps: "In old medieval and early Renaissance maps, the edges were where the monsters were drawn—the sea serpents and many- headed hydras, which were, as we say, off the map."

She provides a brief literary history of the representations of maps and juxtaposes the "off the map" areas of maps with imagination and the arise of the utopia: "Like Plato’s seminal Atlantis and the Avalon of Arthurian romances, these utopias were typically located on islands to be found just out of reach of the real maps, like the utopia in the book of that name by Thomas More."

She posits that the alleged completed exploration of Earth led to stories exploring space.

She then begins to provide a definition of "maps:""Maps are not only about space, they’re also about time: maps are frozen journeys. They may be journeys from the past: places we’ve been, or whose history we’re studying."
- Atwood uses a historical narrative to build up to a working definition of "maps."

Atwood suggests that many an author thinks visually through maps:"Indeed it would seem that quite a few writers think cartographically, especially writers about imaginary places."

Atwood then discusses her idea of ustopia, which is the combination between utopia and dystopia: "As ustopia is by definition elsewhere, it is almost always bracketed by two journeys: the one that transports the tale-teller to the other place and the one that transports him (or her) back so he can deliver his report to us. Thus the writer of the book always has to come up with a mode of transport."
- She suggests that not only is a space involved, but travel to and from that space is necessary.

Atwood continues to give different examples of ustopia throughout history, then has a break in the essay, where she introduces how she got involved in maps: "I came early to maps, though not altogether by choice. My older brother was an inveterate map-maker. Not only did he devise follow- the-clue maps for me, but he drew many maps of imaginary places on other planets."
- Atwood has always been surrounded by maps, considering her brother was a mapmaker, making maps a personal matter, as well as one that she encounters in her professional life.

Atwood concludes this section before another break by stating that, "In literature, every landscape is a state of mind, but every state of mind can also be portrayed by a landscape. And so it is with ustopia."
- She suggests that states of mind and landscapes can be interchangable, as can ustopia.

This is where the shift in the essay occurs from focusing on maps to focusing on ustopias, as Atwood continues to discuss how she became involved in ustopias, her personal studies and research, and her writing experience.

CONCLUSIONS:

The personal anecdote from Atwood might entirely be lost if solely read through the lens of distant reading. That is an entire 9 pages of valuable personal anecdotes from Atwood that might have been overlooked had I solely distant read.

Similarly, the narrative flow of the piece from mentiong maps to the history of maps to a working definition of maps to ideas about ustopia to Atwood's personal experience and back to discussing ustopia to a meditation on Atwood's own writings would be entirely lost if this piece were solely distant read. The flow is not explained or even hinted at when analyzing the correlations between words, the amount of times they are used, and where in the text they are used. In this way, close reading provides specificity and context within the text that distant reading cannot.

Demonstration of Flow in "Spatial Humanities," Along with My Analysis of It:

Wrisley begins with providing a working definition of "digital maps:""Digital maps are objects of our time" (96).

Wrisley continues by describing how "scholars have grown increasingly interested in exploring maps as a way of thinking about research materials, and the humanities provide us with endless use cases. A whole field of the digital humanities known as the spatial humanities has emerged centered on the question of location, pioneering research across and between traditional disciplines" (96).
- He introduces the concept of spatial humanities and its significance within the digital humanities field.

Wrisley writes that,"Map visualizations can be found in all kinds of older printed materials: encyclopedias, linguistic atlases, historical atlases, as well as inserted as figures in the prose of textbooks or scholarly monographs" (97).

Wrisley begins implementing images of maps and data interspersed in his writing while frequently mentioning and referencing them. Taking the images out of the paper would make the paper incomprehensible, as the reader would not be able to see the maps and data that Wrisley references. However, the incorporation of it serves to advance Wrisley's argument.

After showing images of maps, Wrisley writes that, "Neither of these maps attempts to represent time; they show only the spatial distribution of different modern holding institutions across languages" (99).

He later writes, "A static map of a chronicle might include each place mentioned throughout the text indicated by a unique glyph, where color is used to indicate the time of the event" (100).
- He also writes about another map that, "This map visualizes, therefore, how places are mentioned at different moments of historical time" (101).
  - Atwood's piece defines maps of representative of both space and time, and Wrisley's piece shows ways that maps can be representative of time and space in a digital format. The usage of "place" and "time" in the above quote suggest that.
  - Later in the piece, after discussing more technical forms of time and space being represented in maps, Wrisley lists ten ways to help someone who wants to work with spatial data. This list could not have been discovered or understood when distant reading. In this way, distant reading does not provide the same value that close reading does.

CONCLUSIONS:

Just as Atwood recounts history and its relation to maps to introduce her paper, Wrisley does this too. Atwood discusses the usage and significance that maps have had throughout history, although she does so in more of a literary context, whereas Wrisley focuses on more of a practical usage history of maps. The similar introduction of these two pieces is something that the distant reading and data visualizations of these pieces are not able to fully show. In this way, the flows of the pieces are not able to be entirely distantly read.

Wrisley implements images, whereas Atwood does not, despite both discussing maps and the making of them. Wrisley needs the images for his piece to understand the technical aspects of digital mapmaking that he discusses, whereas Atwood's piece makes sense without them.

While distant reading allows these two texts to be compared in various ways, the flow of how they are written, the form, cannot be compared through distant reading in the same way that it can be compared above through close reading. However, despite distant reading not being able to be entirely representative of the flow of a piece, as can be seen moving forward in this project, distant reading can add to an analysis of the flow of each paper.

Similarly, one would need the combination of both close reading and distant reading to be able to fully place these two texts, or any two texts, for that matter, in proper and comprehensive conversation with each other.

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