Distant Reading and the Cartographic Limits of Australian Realism

Fiannuala Morgan (University of Melbourne)

What does it mean to map literature cartographically, and what kinds of knowledge does mapping produce? While “distant reading” promised to transform literary studies through large-scale quantitative analysis, much of this momentum has since stalled in debates over the legitimacy and epistemological limits of computational methods themselves. Beginning from this methodological problem, this paper argues that my own attempts, and repeated failures, to map nineteenth-century Australian fiction is not simply a technical limitation, but rather a historically significant problem that offers a new way of understanding Australian literary history. By situating serialised fiction alongside nineteenth-century Australian media history, this paper demonstrates how the spatial conditions of settler colonialism itself produced distinctively Australian realist modes of writing.

Fiannuala Morgan is a Lecturer in Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines how digital collections and computational methods can generate new ways of understanding Australian cultural history. Her forthcoming monograph, Digital Literary Mapping after NLP, uses cartographic mapping as a method for exploring the relationship between Australian colonial journalism and serialised fiction.