The project begins with Aakarsh Asoka who delves into the economic implications of McKays novel and it’s attitude towards money throughout different stages of the book. He also critically compares Romance in Marseille to another novel based in Marseille, the Count of Monte Cristo. There are two other analyses which similarly examining the novel through economic lenses, one done by Steffi Susan Benjamin and the other by Kai U Cheang. Steffi examines the ways in which specific places McKay references, such as the Seamen’s Club, are used to propel the social and economic narrative. While, Kai illuminates how Lafala’s upward financial mobility affects his self-conception and interpersonal relationships by mapping the spaces and comparing the in-text contexts.
Moving on from the economic themes within the novel, Nuzhat Biswas charts the movements of both Lafala and Aslima, examining the connection behind their movements and those seen of the trans-Atlantic and trans-Mediterranean diasporas. Also looking into the character of Aslima, Megan Pyper explores the spaces she inhabits throughout the novel, and the perceived changes in her character.
Digital Maps provide a useful tool for exploring words visually. This is demonstrated by Molly Herbert who explores the impact of words said throughout the novel and how frequently they appear in context to physical places, displaying them effectively in her map.
In line with our theme, the politics of movement, the next individual piece by Zsófia Hauk critically analyses the balance, or lack thereof, between narrative text and physical and figurative movement in Romance in Marseille. She focuses on the character of St Dominique, tracking his character’s textual presentation and movements to argue for his suspended agency.
The last individual analysis displayed in this project is by Gabriella Maio. She maps the movements of the two central queer characters, La Fleur and Big Blonde, in order to discuss the representation of queer space within the novel.
Throughout this digital project, the individual analyses shown all demonstrate to some extent the real and fictionalised areas of McKay’s Marseille and how they impact and shift the novel’s plot and characterisation through space and place.
Multiple resources and software were used to achieve the aims of this digital project. Initially, the work was quantitative: we extracted data via the AntConc software and Google Sheets. Data compilation was methodical occurring in multiple steps which were necessary for a thorough study of the research material. Once we had established a quality-controlled dataset, we applied digital tools to facilitate our individual analyses.
First, via Optical Character Recognition (OCR), we each digitised at a maximum ten percent of the physical primary text from image screenshots. We implemented our phones’ image-to-text software, copied, and proofread the text. Then, in Google Docs, we shared our individual OCRs. In effect, we transferred the text from screenshots of individual chapter pages to a format that digital software could read, which in our case, was the text file format for AntConc. Also, the fact that we use our phones everyday (to scan QR Codes, take photos of interesting texts, etc.) rendered an accessible OCR process.
Individual analyses implemented AntConc, Laurence Anthony’s free software. We performed KWIC (keyword in context) searches to isolate words and their contexts; these results were integrated in individual analyses. Overall, AntConc enabled a fast quantitative exploration of the text. For example, in Gabriella Maio’s The Vocabulary of Queer Space in Romance in Marseille, AntConc provided insight on the contexts in which the story’s queer characters are mentioned. Thus, though the software provides quantitative data, it facilitated qualitative analyses: efficient parsing of the text enabled us to expand the scope of our analyses to the entire text.
Moreover, we used AntConc to identify locations that we would eventually map via Google Maps. Google’s map creation service enables users to input the geographic coordinates of locations onto a world map. Our group would perform KWIC searches for place names such as ‘café,’ ‘restaurant,’ ‘bar,’ ‘Africa’, ‘child’, etc. We compiled the AntConc data to Google Sheets. A key reference resource was the David Rumsey Digital Map Collection. On the free map database, we viewed decades-old maps of Marseille.
However, Romance in Marseille is a work of fiction. In mapping fictional places, we make assumptions, particularly since the storyteller’s priority is rarely geographic consistency. In “Do Digital Humanists Need to Understand Algorithms”, Benjamin K. Schmidt reiterates the importance of understanding the aims, as opposed to the underlying, internal complexity, of algorithms that automate transformations (ch. 48). As we employed digital mapping tools, it was important that we retain what it was that we wanted to map in the first place because, in mapping a fictional place, what assumptions do we make? Moreover, how certain can we be of the geographic coordinates of a location that a work of fiction mentions? In “GIS, Texts, and Images: New Approaches”, Ian Gregory and David Cooper admit that during the Mapping of the Lakes project, the assignation of textual place names to geographic coordinates integrates a place-name gazetteer, whose grid references are accurate “to the nearest kilometer but for linear features, such as rivers, or vague features, such as valleys, may be somwhat misleading” (4). We toggled between reality and fiction (imagined spaces contextualised to specific geographic coordinates), and juggled the assumptions that digital tools make. For example, Google Maps limits spaces and words to single markers. As a result, Molly Herbert opted to present information in her analysis, Mapping God: Characterising Religious Space in Everyday Place, via Canva.
After the quantitative work came scholarly qualitative analysis. Our digital project demonstrates the varied degrees to which individuals concentrated on the extrapolated data and engaged with qualitative literary analyses of McKay’s text; in effect, individuals employed different methods to encapsulate McKay’s world and story. Throughout the project, however, we used Zotero, a citations management software, to curate references and information sources. Zotero automates citation and bibliography generation; it is efficient and cites consistently in accordance with official Modern Language Association citation guidelines. Also, we pooled our citations to a single folder, facilitating collective research. This is a Digital Humanities’ principle, an interdisciplinary field. Further, Trello, a workspace management tool, allowed us to coordinate tasks (project load distribution) and deadlines.
Admittedly, the tools we applied were just that: tools. The quantitative work we engaged in generated fruitful data, but we had to assure the quality of the extracted data (e.g., check for typographic misalignments between the screenshotted text and the generated text), as well as perform additional humanities research to drive our literary arguments. The integration of these digital tools for our digital project embodies a shift in the larger field of Digital Humanities to create and use computational tools that are deployed on humanities data. We studied Romance in Marseille under a quantitative lens and elicited data that bolstered the qualitative arguments we made. We were literary scientists, granted new tools with which to conduct experiments. This aligns with a key Digital Humanities principle: to function as the interstice between the Sciences and the Humanities, to facilitate new forms of teaching and research.
Many scholars have taken to the field of Digital Humanities, and the field’s value has skyrocketed in response. However, this elicited introspective and self-reflective discourse and highlighted the field’s interdisciplinary nature (e.g., computer science provides the Digital in Digital Humanities). In Matthew K. Gold’s “The Digital Humanities Moment”, Gold reiterates the stance of Stephan Ramsay, a University of Nebraska scholar: “moving from reading and critiquing to building and making” (Ramsay, “On Building”, qtd. in Introduction)
Work Cited
Gold, Matthew K. “‘Introduction: The Digital Humanities Moment | Matthew K. Gold’ in ‘Debates in the Digital Humanities’ on Debates in the DH Manifold.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/fcd2121c-0507-441b-8a01-dc35b8baeec6#intro. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023.
Gregory, Ian, and David Cooper. “GIS, Texts, and Images: New Approaches.” Poetess Archive Journal, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–22.
Schmidt, Benjamin M. “Do Digital Humanists Need to Understand Algorithms?” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452963761.
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