About the Project
This digital humanities project exhibits a digital map of Thomas Hardy's Wessex, the fictional setting of all of his major novels. The locations in Hardy’s Wessex are based on real locations in the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Someset, Devon, and Hampshire in the south and southwestern region of England. Told from the perspective of Hardy's most famous novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the map plots the locations in which they first appear in the novel. Considered Hardy's masterpiece and one of the best examples of nineteenth century naturalistic fiction, I have included literary passages in the map from Tess of the d'Urbervilles that best exemplifies Hardy's depiction of the rural landscape of Wessex in connection with the novel's themes of predeterminism, laws of nature, evolution, sexuality, and social environment factors.
As noted by many critics, the landscape of Wessex serves as a central element in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, providing both spatial and symbolic insight into the characters of the novel and phases of Tess's life. Due to the integral role the landscape of Wessex plays in the novel, creating a digital map of Wessex from the perspective of Tess's story is highly ideal. The locations in Hardy's illustrated map can easily be compared with today's corresponding real locations in England. By providing a visual mapping of Hardy's Wessex, I hope to offer new literary insights into the understanding and scholarly teachings of Hardy's life and writings.
How I created the Map?
After reviewing various GIS tools with Indiana University, Bloomington's GIS Librarian, Theresa Quill, I used NYPL's open source mapping tool, Map Warper, to align and geo-rectify a digitized illustrated map of Thomas Hardy's Wessex in correspondence to its real locations in England. Later in ArcGIS online, I then added the geo-rectified version of Thomas Hardy's illustrated map of Wessex as a layer to a basemap of the southern region of England. I then made a copy of the basemap of the southern region of England and placed it side by side the geo-rectified version of Thomas Hardy's illustrated map of Wessex in Esri Story Map Swiper for comparison. Hardy's illustrated map of Wessex can now be seen digitally next to a GIS map of today's southern region of England. Upon clicking on each location in the map, you will see the fictional name of the location in Hardy's Wessex, along with its real location's name.
*Future goals of this project include building upon the digital story map I have already created by incorporating Hardy's other Wessex novels (e.g. The Return of the Native, Far from the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, etc.).