Journal of Geo-information Science, Volume. 22, Issue 5, 967(2020)
Literary cartography enables the representation of literary space and the mapping between diachronic text and synchronic space. It serves as an 'ancillary science' in literary geography methodologies. Previous cartographic practices usually focus on either of these two items rather than considering text and space as an interactive entirety. In order to reconstruct the traditional relationship between linear narrative and juxtaposed space in Chinese classical narrative literature, this paper proposes a framework of digital models integrating theories of spatial narrative and methods from literary cartography, computational narratology, and geo-narrative, and consequently reveals the spatio-temporal narrative of a Chinese classical novel, The Tale of Li Wa, which is about a love story happening in the capital Chang'an of Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) and has been diversely interpreted by literary critics and historians since approximately 900 years ago. The framework is inspired by M.M. Bakhtin's chronotope concept which highlights the context of narrative, Gabriel Zoran's topographical-chronotopic-textual space which emphasizes the fictional literature space as a reconstruction process involving readers, and W.J.T. Mitchell's spatial metaphor focusing on "a spatial apprehension of the work as a system for generating meaning". This Time-Space-time-Space framework enables varied structured semantics (including the spatio-temporal information) semi-manually derived from the novel's text and its necessary historical context, as the lack of mature natural language processing tools for ancient Chinese. These value-added structured semantics are then extracted and fused to map the instantaneous spatial pattern perceived by readers in the flow of reading time through data visualization, computational social science, and spatial analysis. The organized spatio-temporal representations of The Tale of Li Wa can help re-understand this classical narrative and its social context of Tang Chang’an city in a situational, vague, and explanatory approach. The Time-Space-time-Space framework, along with the new practice on literary cartography, embeds linearity, experience, and significance of the narrative in an open and dialogic field. It also provides a potential of narrating the place and reading the narrative from both "macro-micro" and immersive perspective.
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Zhaoyi MA, Jie HE, Shuaishuai LIU.
Received: Nov. 30, 2019
Accepted: --
Published Online: Nov. 12, 2020
The Author Email: HE Jie (janushe@tju.edu.cn)