Mapping Bishop

I gave a talk hosted by the Critical Media Lab at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland called "Mapping Bishop: A Case Study on the Dialogue between Software Models and Literary Analysis." Here is a description of the talk:

As a doctoral candidate with the Institute of English Studies at the Université de Neuchâtel, I am studying how place is mediated in literary texts by analyzing materials such as correspondence, journal entries, manuscript drafts, and literary works. In this talk, I will describe the process of developing a digital humanities project Mapping Bishop and of mediating the research material through technology. Specifically, I’m looking at the work of American poet Elizabeth Bishop, who grew up in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts and then moved to Brazil, where she lived and wrote for 15 years. As part of this study, I collaborated with Dr. Andrew Sempere of Place Lab Ltd. to make a spatio-temporal map of Bishop’s movement and correspondence. Mapping Bishop acts as what Seymour Papert called an “object-to-think-with” — a computer model that serves as an externalization of theories, approaches, and assumptions that can be interrogated. I will discuss the various inflection points in this project, including different methods of visualizing the material and making it experiential.