As Willard McCarty observes in “Modeling: A Study in Words and Meaning,” representation overlaps with a denotative model-of. Building a model is, according to McCarty, a “representation of something for the purposes of study, or a design for realizing something new.” My map of Ulysses is at heart a Geertzian “denotative model-of”—an imagined or fictionalized representation of the text designed to heighten the capacity to interpret Ulysses in a specific way; namely, the goal is to re-present Ulysses spatially in order to uncover the spatial and geopolitical relations in the novel. This representational model-of has distinct pedagogical aims, aligning with McCarty’s definition of a model-of. Implementing it, though even provisionally, has garnered more research questions (for me) not only concerning Ulysses, but also data visualization and the very practice of distant reading.

The model-of, according to McCarty, is a “consciously simplifying act of interpretation.” He proposes that “a model is by nature a simplified and therefore fictional or idealized  [always-already deformed] representation, often taking a rough-and-ready form.” The model, then, is ineluctably a fictional representation of the object of inquiry. With “Mapping Ulysses,” my model seeks to isolate the toponyms from Ulysses to decode the spatial relationships between these points with as much geographical accuracy as possible on a Google Earth map. This first step opens up a line of inquiry regarding the significance of certain toponyms, unveiling the power-relations behind street naming, monument building, etc. Second, this act of isolation inaugurates an evaluation and interpretation of the characters’ psychogeographic relationships to the named locations. This is, in effect, a mimetic process.      

Allow me to walk you through the data visualization: To simplify my project, I select the toponyms and pinning them to a map. In doing so the relations between the locations in Ulysses begin to unfold. Even provisional mappings of the text has opened myriad research questions and has elucidated much of Joyce’s aesthetic method. For example, I’ll walk you through a map of “Lotus Eaters,” the fifth episode of Ulysses. 

Critiques of this representational model-of abound. Johanna Drucker, for example, repudiates the map I’m proposing, indicting it as a “grotesque distortion” of the “imaginative spatial experience that infuses the text with images of an urban imaginary irreducible to its material counterpart” ("Humanistic Theory" 94). I would, in this instance, celebrate where she appalls; namely, the distortion she critiques has a specific productivity to it in that it abuts deformance—a subtle, but integral aspect of modelling and representation.   

Deformance predicates the type of representation I’m proposing. Following McGann, my project commits one of the main types of deformance outlined in Radiant Textuality, namely isolation. On a basic level, building the map requires the removal of toponyms from the text. After this act of isolation, I have to interpret the relationships between these toponyms that are not always self-evident; the characters’ relation to locations in Ulysses is often difficult to decode. In “Hades” for example, the single line paragraph that reports only a toponym, “Nelson’s Pillar,” abruptly interrupts the flow of narration. Are the men in the funeral procession passing Nelson’s Pillar in Sackville street? Do they all regard it? Why does the toponym punctuate the narration so abrubtly? Finally, following the lines Alison’s project, isolating each character’s itinerary has open up some interesting questions about the gendering of the city: Ulysses has few female characters, but the itineraries they trace are wildly circumscribed compared to Ulysses’ men. The toponyms in “Penelope,” for example, relate mostly to concert halls and teashops, while Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy appear never to leave the Ormond Hotel, and even Josie Breen, who Bloom meets on Westmoreland street, never strays far from her husband.  

While, according to Drucker in "Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display, “Google maps” may be “[s]o naturalized . . . that they pass as unquestioned representations of 'what is'”—something this project cannot hope to solve without attaining a much higher visual literacy—the isolation of 1904 toponyms on a contemporary map of Dublin to decode Ulysses exposes layers of Dublin’s spatial palimpsest. This subtle deformance approaches Ulysses as an historically situated document (which is itself already a deformed picture of Dublin that highlights the transformations between 1904 and 1922) and opens up a comparative model for other representations of Dublin.