For a quick follow-up on last week's Gephi practicum I want to share a re-visualization of Haywood's "Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze" I did with ManyEyes. Though no less tangled, viewing the story in this way makes it a bit easier to see each character's contribution to the overall network by de-emphasizing their positions as nodes and instead foregrounding their edge weights. Interestingly, the number and range of these edges in this new visualization are arranged in such a way as to suggest that the unnamed girl, above all other iterations of her identity, is a kind of prime motivator for the story's events (because that node can articulate so many different types of interactions? because its edge count wins out over the others?).

Now, for this week . . . 

Thomas Pynchon's novels are notoriously tangled and diffuse. Most of them would be appropriate for a mapping exercise, seeing as they all tend to skip counties, countries, and continents as fast as (or faster than) you can turn a page, but the scene changes in Against the Day, his longest book, are particularly wide-ranging. The novel mostly follows a group of boys called the Chums of Chance who, acting as a kind of through-line for the rest of the narrative's event, sail around the world to various adventures in a giant hydrogen skyship called the Inconvenience. Pynchon's style riffs on almost every turn of the century popular fiction genre imaginable -- young boys' adventure stories, Westerns, detective fiction, etc -- and he usually marks his changes with new episodes. I chose the first ten of these episodes in the book's second part, Iceland Spar (of which eight out of ten are in different locations), copied over their descriptions from Wikipedia (available here), and mapped them out with StoryMap JS.

Given the fact that these events all happen in the space of about 120 pages, which constitutes only a tenth or so of the novel's overall length, this would be a useful tool for tracking the Chums' adventures. Admittedly, though, half the fun of reading this book is not knowing where you are. Also, the jacket blurb states that the boys end up in "one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all." One of these places includes the center of the Earth, which a two-dimensional representation doesn't seem particularly well-suited to handle. Still, a paratext like this would certainly prove to be useful, especially considering Pynchon's penchant for the occult and conspiratorial (thinking here of the way in which Gravity's Rainbow literalizes 00000's parabolic trajectory with its own cyclical story arc and the curvilinear travels of Slothrop et al). It wouldn't be beyond him to spell out some hidden message or symbol which only a map like the one above could reveal.

One thing this kind of visualization (or any in the Toychest, for that matter) doesn't seem to be able to handle is temporality. Or rather, it can manage a linear narrative just fine, but the moment its diegetic chronology (syuzhet) departs from the chronology of its story (fabula), things fall apart. There doesn't seem to be an effective way for me to depict the possibility of reading B before A and C, even though the events technically progress as A->B->C. In media res is visualization's darkest nightmare. I used this example once in class but it's worth repeating: how do we dynamically and comprehensively visualize a film like Christopher Nolan's Memento, which ends up playing out something like this (and even this is fairly clunky)?

In Pamphlet #2 Moretti writes that a network captures the transience of gestures and acts in Macbeth and puts them on display alongside all others. There are definitely advantages to seeing the play flattened in this way, as he goes on to show, but something is also lost in that change. Thinking back to "Fantomina," it's worth pointing out that the dynamic of the story completely changes when the unnamed girl becomes pregnant: her identity ceases to shift and ossifies around her motherhood. This is an important and discrete moment in the narrative which signals a huge change in its structure but both my Gephi and MakeEyes webs fail to highlight it. Can temporality be both flattened and progressively visualized?