About

Digital Humanities has recently been concerned with “mapping”. Mapping things, concepts, words, ideas, as well as spaces and places. Certainly, the geolocative turn in 2001, to which I will return, has been instrumental in the development of spatial ideas over the past 12 years, especially in Digital Humanities discourse, but it is particularly in the last few years that “mapping”  – particularly in the more direct sense having to do with spaces and places, has become prevalent in the field.

The geolocative as a frequently unverbalised, yet persistently underlying concept in Digital Humanities discourses has formed an unexpected tool for exploring was the idea of location, space and place in China Miéville’s The City & The City, specifically by contrasting the notion of a science fiction type palimpsest or crosshatch and a hyperlinked, tagged and networked space.

What I therefore propose to do, is to explore and examine the concepts of location, geolocation and geolocative space  in Miéville’s novel, through the application of Digital Humanities discourse to the texts, simultaneously exploring the state of the geolocative in the modern cultural conciousness and the impact of the 2001 geolocative turn on contemporary literature.