If someone asked me to list the best books I've read this week, "Maps, Graphs and Trees" would be at the top of the list. Primarily because its the only book I read this week. As one who is not typically thrilled with the topic of literature, there wasn't a ton that truly captured my attention about this book. I do really enjoy Maps, Graphs and Trees but I did not anticipate that discussion of maps, graphs and trees. Still I found it somewhat interesting to look at novels in such a manner. I also enjoyed looking at the historical analysis of the novels genres popularity and the seeming "death" of genres in British novel sales. I wonder if that is still occurring today and that data would compare if you looked at a similar country such as France. My guess is it'd be pretty similar until the countries had major events that totally shifted life in those countries. The author did get at that when he mentioned the impact of the French Revolution and other major events throughout the first section of the book. Although he liked to point out that we often look at one major event or person in history. I personally feel like you have to do that because that major event or person creates a major impact on the "average/ normal everyday activities" that were alluded too. Certainly the French Revolution or the Rise of someone like Hitler or Stalin impacted the everyday lives of the people in France, Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Certainly the events are related. The major changes in those countries certainly impacted the novels being written. That is both in terms of censorship and overall experience of the writer whether it is consciously or subconsciously impacts their writing. I think that ultimately leads to the trends we saw from Genres dying. As country's events shift, so does the persona and experience of writers and readers. On an unrelated side note, I think this data would be a bit more interested today as we have much higher literacy rates. If were truly looking for meaningful data about everyday people pre 1900, I don't believe the topic/ sales of novels is the best choice and many folks either couldn't read or did not have the luxury of reading available to them. Nevertheless, I guess this book did spark some type of reaction from me. One of the other tid bits I thought was pretty interesting was the analysis of a village and the literary map. As one who loves a good map, I appreciated the thought out leaving the village, then coming home to create the circular map. I think maps and mapping is something that is often too overlooked or forgotten about in 2017. The Idea of a literary map never came to my mind as I'm not floored by much literature but I thought this was a unique way to view the story and in some respects similar to what we'd discussed in previous classes about how a DH project asks how can I present this information in a way that is MORE beneficial to the viewer? How can I enhance the viewers experience and I certainly think those maps are one way to do just that.
T-Minus 24 hours till more Digital Humanities, Adam
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Adam RudyHistory Teacher, Cross Country and Track Coach, Runner, Amateur Blogger Archives
September 2017
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