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The central instrument for the exploration of literary geography has two components: a database of texts and a cartographic visualisation which grows out of this database.
Database
The database contains texts ranging from regional to world literature with appropriate thematic, temporal and geographic attributes ("metadata"). The first step is quantitative, since for each model region several hundred texts are registered.
In the next step, precise queries can be directed to the database: Where is the historical novel staged in the nineteenth century? When does the fictionalising process begin for a certain region? Where are there historically saturated zones, which lend themselves to historialising accounts, and where are there history-free zones?
Visualisations
The results are shown as maps, tables, or diagrams, but the maps generated are not merely statistical. At any time, the query parameters can be adjusted interactively, so that new insights can be gained through new cartographic visualisations. It is also possible to show diachronic developments, for example through animation.
Commentary, Interpretations
Through the combination of the database and cartographic renderings, fictional spaces become visible. The newly generated map material thus allows a much more exact, closer description of a fictionalised space and its genesis than previously.
In a final phase, literary historians interpret and comment on the cartographic representations – and in this way become the authors of single sample chapters of a spatially structured literary history of Europe.
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