The patterns discovered in different mapping projects that this panel proposes offer opportunities to develop transnational insights into canon formation, textual circulation, and the spatial imaginary. A seventeenth-century Chinese volume of short stories and Australian journalistic accounts and serialized fiction in nineteenth-century newspapers thus can speak to each other when the two panelists explore the geographical patterns of the Chinese and Australian works. The Chinese cultural currents interacted with their British counterpart in locations where traditional Chinese fiction were introduced into the English-speaking world during the nineteenth century.
Margaret Wan uses the case study of Jingu qiguan (Marvelous Views Old and New) to examine the relationship between geographic transmission and canon formation. Jingu qiguan, a volume of vernacular stories, was one of the most reprinted works of fiction in Ming-Qing China, judging by the number of editions. Yet it has garnered only a fraction of the scholarly attention devoted to the earlier collections Sanyan (Three Words) or Erpai (Two Slapping the Table). This paper explores the gap between the popularity of Jingu qiguan and the prestige of the earlier collections by looking at the process of canon formation through the patterns of printing and reprinting these collections across time and space. This project also serves as proof of concept of a digital humanities approach to understanding traditional Chinese vernacular fiction as “literature in space.” Tagging the specific digital editions of huaben collections with bibliographic metadata makes it immediately possible to see networks of connections and visualize them on a scale that is otherwise impossible. This kind of literary mapping and network analysis provides a compelling way to get beyond the handful of well-known, extensively studied texts and change the scale at which we do literary criticism and cultural history.
Fiannuala Morgan asks the fundamental question of what we seek to achieve and what we create when we map literary sources. Rather than reducing the complex representations of space in literary texts (as critics sometimes argue), cartographic approaches enable scholars to advance historical spatial claims based on a presumed equivalency between textual worlds and reality. In this paper, Morgan draws on recent theoretical scholarship on Topic Modeling, a machine-learning technique that groups thematically related documents, to conceive of a computational cartographic approach as productive of a constellation of ‘latent geographic associations’ that ultimately facilitate diverse and non-singular interpretations. Morgan applies this framework to her current research mapping the locations of bushfires published in journalistic accounts and serialized fiction in nineteenth-century Australian newspapers as a means of exploring the affordances and limitations that digital mapping yields for historical and literary analysis.
Junjie Luo shows that the locations of publishers and translators impacted the English translation of traditional Chinese fiction in the nineteenth century. Traditional Chinese fiction began to be translated into English during the eighteenth century. Such translations proliferated during the nineteenth century. While scholars have studied the texts of these translations, the translations’ publishers have received little attention. Examining the publishers’ geographical locations can shed new light on the history of how people produced and consumed these translations during the nineteenth century. Luo uses network analysis tools, such as Gephi and Palladio, to visualize the relationships among the locations of publishers, translators, and translated. His preliminary finding is that the publishers’ geographical locations concentrated in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century and gradually moved to southern China during the mid-nineteenth century and further north to cities such as Shanghai and Beijing during the late-nineteenth century. Mapping the publishers’ locations reveals new facets of the relationship between this body of English translations and the canon of Chinese literature and explains why fictional pieces translated into English at the beginning of the nineteenth century are not generally regarded as canonical works in Chinese literary history.
Mapping with digital humanities approaches offers a new understanding of the complex representation of space in texts and facilitates conversations between scholars working on different literary traditions through identifying and comparing geographical patterns.