Warm-Up #3

Modelling Daytripper

For this warm-up you will make a “model” or a “map”—not necessarily a geographic map—that highlights some spatial, temporal, thematic, or structural elements of Daytripper.

A “map” does not necessarily have to be a cartographic map. In fact, the last thing I want is a faithful map of all the “places” in Daytripper. Rather, by “map” I mean a model: an abstract visual or three-dimensional representation of some element of the graphic novel that captures its complexity and reveals a pattern or set of relations that a straightforward reading might overlook. A timeline of events in Brás’s life is one example of a “map,” although for the purposes of this warm-up, such a timeline risks oversimplifying the work.

In an article called “Graphs, Maps, and Trees,” the critic Franco Moretti makes a case for creating what he calls literary maps:

What do literary maps do . . . First, they are a good way to prepare a text for analysis. You choose a unit — walks, lawsuits, luxury goods, whatever — find its occurrences, place them in space . . .  or in other words: you reduce the text to a few elements, and abstract them, and construct a new, artificial object. A model. And at this point you start working at a ‘secondary’ level, removed from the text: a map, after all, is always a look from afar — or is useless, like Borges’s map of the empire. Distant reading, I have called this work elsewhere; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Patterns. (New Left Review 26 (2004), p. 94)

There are a number of ways to approach this inquiry. For examples of different kinds of mapping visualizations, browse through the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. I encourage you to be creative and to make use of any style or tool necessary. You can be as low-tech or high-tech as you want; your map can be hand-constructed or you can use sophisticated online tools like TimelineJS, Storymaps, Palladio, or other digital data visualization tools.

Whatever form your “model” takes, be sure to include a legend or key that explains the information represented.

Making Sense of the Model

Once your map/model and legend are complete, you can turn to the next part of the inquiry. In roughly 750 words, reflect upon what your model reveals about Daytripper. How does this abstract model of the graphic novel encourage a “distant reading” and what does that reading tell us? How does the map reveal qualitative or quantitative aspects of the graphic novel that would elude a typical close reading? Also, walk us through your thinking process: what element(s) of the graphic novel were you trying to convey, and why did your “map” take the shape it did? Finally, how does your map/model succeed, and what are its limitations?

Post the entire project onto your domain. This includes an image of your map/model (and embed or link to it if it’s online), as well as the 750-word essay.

Deadline: Thursday, March 17. Bring your original map or model to class that day. The essay/blog post is due by midnight on the 17th.