Canadian Magazines and Their Spatial Contexts: Digital Possibilities and Practical Realities

The digitization of literary texts and periodicals brings with it exciting possibilities, including the ability to create visualizations of places and trajectories using mapping technologies. However, such mapping also has the potential to be somewhat perilous, as researchers need to invest significant amounts of time without always being certain in advance about the intellectual benefits that will result. In this article, I ask what it means to map place in relation to little magazines—places of publication, places mentioned, places whose broader imaginative pull is attested to by depictions of travel and tourism—and consider not only how but also why and when it is worth going to the trouble of geocoding texts from literature, literary history, and book history. I take several case studies of digital projects which use mapping of various sorts to explore what can be discovered from geographical and other forms of visualization, and I suggest particular kinds of data, and text, that are especially beneficial to bring within the ambit of this kind of methodological approach.