Keywords: text mapping, ArcGIS, gothic literature
The public-facing digital humanities project Mapping Gothic Dublin: 1822-1900, a collaboration between the UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics and Museum of Literature Ireland, is the first large-scale study of Irish gothic literature within the context of nineteenth-century Dublin. During this time, the capital city was characterised by social change, political upheaval, and migration after the Act of Union (1800), as well as technological progress, modernisation, and artistic creativity. The project’s curated multimedia outputs illustrate the duality between the written city found in literature and the lived, physical reality of Dublin across time, resulting in an understanding of urban space as a spectral, layered palimpsest.
Using the tools of ARCGis and archival research, this project thus seeks to create a visualisation of the geospatial and sociohistorical features of gothic texts by nineteenth-century Irish writers that are set in Dublin (and, in the case of creative and intellectual migrants like Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker and, in London). However, certain challenges arise when mapping gothic fiction, which, with its ghostly hauntings and historical interruptions, is by its very nature both temporally and spatially inconsistent.
The city in literature is both an imaginative entity and a reflection of lived reality, but the haunted city has an added layer of spectrality that is inherent within the nature of supernatural hauntings. This paper will outline the temporal and spatial anomalies of the gothic, and lead to a theory of mapping spectrality. The considerations of the geospatial and sociopolitical dimensions of the urban gothic are timely, as fears over proximity and contagion are resonant within COVID-era public health restrictions and their impact on imaginary and lived cities.