Types of Spaces
- Explicit: Mentioned explicitly by name or allusion by the author.
- Implicit: Not mentioned by name or allusion, but can be geolocated by the description of events or other markers.
- Mentioned: A place that is mentioned, while the action takes place elsewhere.
- Multiple points: Chains, networks, or multiple places that are connected or associated with one another.
- Origins: Adjectives—demonyms and ethnonyms, for example—with embedded geographic data.
Annotating Simple and Embedded Geographic Information
- Named places
Madrid, El barranco de Embajadores
- Unnamed, but identifiable places
Una plaza grande—>La Plaza Mayor
- Unnamed, unidentifiable, but geolocatable
La freiduría de la Glorieta de Atocha
- Demonyms and ethnonyms
Madrileña, mideluéstica, esquimal, hotentotes
- The origin of people, groups, objects, or metaliterary references
El cómite Premio Nobel (Sweden), Eugenia Grandet (France), Neslé (Switzerland), El Kama-sutra (India)
Other Spatial and Geographic Data
- Motion-oriented verbs, nouns, adjectives:
Subir, huir, caminar, llegada, viandantes, hundido, descendente
- Adverbs pertaining to position or displacement:
hacia, desde, hasta, fuera de
- Geographic words: Cuesta, cerro, cornisa, río, sierra
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“Weird” and liminal spaces (heterotopias):
Mirrors, cars, trains, the metro, roads, cemeteries, tombs, borders, museums, street festivals, etc. Motion-oriented verbs, nouns, adjectives:
Subir, huir, caminar, llegada, viandantes, hundido, descendente
- Adverbs pertaining to position or displacement:
hacia, desde, hasta, fuera de
Finding Patterns and Points of Convergence/Divergence
Reading this way—even before analyzing the text digitally—reveals patterns. For example:
- The importance of the origin of people, objects, ideas, and literary works. A side effect of the suffocating postwar environment and its imposed silence.
- Parallelisms and overlapping. Every place is simultaneously another place. Every person has a literary/historic doppelganger with its own geographic baggage.
- The mapped city versus the unmapped peripheral “edgelands.”
Presentations:
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