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This short methods paper emerges out of the AHRC-funded ‘Chronotopic Cartographies’ project for the digital mapping of place and space as represented in works of literature. The primary aim of that project was to find a way of mapping and visualizing represented literary worlds for which there is no corresponding real ‘ground’. A solution was found in the form of topological graphs which allow for relative rather than absolute mapping (but also permit a relative imaginary map to be lain on top of a pre-existing cartesian form). Using a spatial schema to chunk out the text in terms of chronotopic (time-space) zones enables the generation of a series of visualizations that show different kinds of spatio-temporal constructions in texts. The visualizations are centred upon nodes that consist of chronotopes (e.g. ‘the road’) as well as locations (e.g. ‘road to Geneva’); connections between them of different kinds and toporefs within them (references to other places from this one). The pa...

This article explores Damien Hirst's 2017 exhibition The Wreck of the Unbelievable, which mischievously purported to present treasures salvaged from the wreck of the legendary Apistos. How might we preserve, curate, and otherwise mediate such ambitious and distributed artworks, which extend in such convoluted ways through diverse social and cultural spaces, and which deliberately ambiguate their own boundaries and encounters? Where artworks both seek to capture and to intervene in their own historical moment, what obligations and affordances arise for future historians, curators, critics, and publics? Might the challenges set by The Wreck of the Unbelievable even model a new kind of digital art history including, for example, data generated incidentally and abundantly by digital processes? This article playfully mobilises new Digital Humanities methods for reading the vast and stormy seas of social media data discourse, reading between the artwork itself and the historical 'moment' in which it is so entangled.

This short methods paper emerges out of the AHRC-funded 'Chronotopic Cartographies' project for the digital mapping of place and space as represented in works of literature. The primary aim of that project was to find a way of mapping and visualizing represented literary worlds for which there is no corresponding real 'ground'. A solution was found in the form of topological graphs which allow for relative rather than absolute mapping (but also permit a relative imaginary map to be lain on top of a pre-existing cartesian form). Using a spatial schema to chunk out the text in terms of chronotopic (time-space) zones enables the generation of a series of visualizations that show different kinds of spatio-temporal constructions in texts. The visualizations are centred upon nodes that consist of chronotopes (e.g. 'the road') as well as locations (e.g. 'road to Geneva'); connections between them of different kinds and toporefs within them (references to other places from this one). The paper will articulate core methods from the project, outlining the stages involved in the process, from marking up the text, using a custom-made schema, through graph generation and into the implications for analysis. This will be illustrated in relation to two Victorian texts: the realist space of Dickens's Oliver Twist; and the abstract poetic space of Browning's 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' .

Seventeen months into our three-year programme, Congruence Engine is broadly on time and on budget, addressing the stated aims and objectives; the project team is working selectively with the project partners (in the expectation that all will be enrolled across the duration of the project). Our systemic action research methodology is working well to organise the investigation, and tentative findings are emerging from it. The 'personality' of Congruence Engine within the set of five Discovery Projects is clear: it is the project that is exploring and experimentally enacting what it would mean to potential future users of a national collection to be able to do historical and curatorial work in a world of cross-collection accessibility. We are selectively adopting the 'social machine' metaphor to articulate the combination of human intervention and programming affordances necessary to achieve this (Shadbolt et al 2022). The early project change away from using machine learning towards more 'hand-stitched' investigations was reversed in a decisive turn towards the digital in late 2022. Both of these changes of emphasis were linked to a deepening understanding of the 'material conditions' of the project, which has notably included the ease or difficulty of appointing people with key expertise, especially those with technical computing skills.