© Nadeem Haidary 2009

Fictional Convergences

If two characters from two different stories were at the same place at the same time, could they meet? This project explores that possibility by mapping characters from novels set in Victorian London. Searching through the digital texts of Dickens, Defoe, and other authors for their characters’ journeys yielded four convergences, displayed as wooden spheres. These convergences encourage the viewer’s imagination: how would a meeting between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Jekyll, for example, play out? The eventual goal of this project is to create an open-source database of the fictional universe.

The scope of the project's range in time and space was limited to Victorian London, between 1850-1899. The data in this range was chosen because it is both rich and past copyright restrictions, making it searchable with Google Books or Project Gutenberg.

Data was collected by searching for placename keywords, such as "park", "Thames" or "Regent's Square", in digital versions of the novels. As the data was collected, it was plotted onto a customized Google Map.

These sketches explore ways of visualizing the data three-dimensionally on an extruded map, with time being the third dimension.

Definite places a character has been is indicated with circles, which are connected to each other by lines. Definite convergences are indicated by wooden spheres (the larger unfilled circle) but crossovers in the lines suggest that there might be other convergences in the space between the author's words.

The final visualization was made from clear acrylic and laser engraved. Each panel has a different decade, but by looking down from the top, you can see all the character's journeys together.

The data was organized into decades because unlike movement through places, authors rarely give very specific time periods for their character's movements.