This is leg two of Mapping MAMM, a series exploring various research questions around the Mapping Ann-Marie MacDonald Research Project. In this chapter, I’ll analyze the cross-disciplinarity of the project. You can read the first, introductory installment of the series here.
How does one “map” literature? One can read literature and even experience it, but what role could maps have in the study of fiction?
These are the questions I asked myself months before discovering the MAMM project, when I learned about “literary geography” in ENGL 4P64 with Dr. Neta Gordon.
One tends to think of the “setting” as a backdrop to a work of fiction, but when you re-consider the role of the environment, you begin to understand the setting as something of a character itself: variable and multi-faceted, with the ability to shape a narrative as well as house it.
But what if you could map out more than just the setting in a creative work? What if you could map experience and events? Emotions, even, or relationships? The Mapping Ann-Marie MacDonald Research Project may be intensively focused on analyzing literature, but you’d be wrong in assuming it’s primarily an English endeavour.
Rather, MAMM inhabits numerous disciplines across numerous faculties, including English, Geography and the Digital Humanities.
The interests of Geography and Tourism Studies Associate Professor Dr. Ebru Ustundag, for instance, revolve around fields such as Graphic Medicine, Health Humanities and Geohumanities, which Ebru describes as a “cross-pollination” between Social Sciences, Humanities, Health Sciences and more.
“What makes spaces political? And in what ways are politics spatial?” asks Dr. Ustundag in her research. “There’s the discourse of power dynamics, so I’m trying to understand in what ways bigger systems like capitalism, colonialism and racialization might play into these things as they unfold in spaces.” When it comes to the MAMM project, this has meant exploring “in what ways [they] can create alternative visual representations and understandings of Ann-Marie MacDonald and her work.”
Mapping literature, then, begins to make more sense: maps become an alternate way of exploring Ann-Marie’s worlds and a physical manifestation of the reading experience.
It’s this way of thinking about reading that invites scholars of the Digital Humanities into the conversation.
“Really, since the advent of computing, computers have been used to solve problems in the Humanities,” says Primary Investigator (PI) Dr. Aaron Mauro, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Digital Humanities (DH) at Brock.
For MAMM, this has meant introducing new sets of tools to the practice of text-based analysis, including artificial intelligence (A.I.), large language models (LLMs), data visualization programs like Voyant, geographical information systems (GIS) and more.
If you’ve just read this and immediately rejected the notion of A.I. having any role to play in the Humanities, you wouldn’t be alone. I had trouble reconciling the idea when I was first introduced to it, but knowing the ethics of the project and the people behind it, I kept an open mind and asked Aaron myself.
He explained to me that many people in DH have approached tools like ChatGPT “with a sense of curiosity, awe, suspicion [and] a sense of a critical nature.” But beyond that, they’ve also been working to expand methodologies and ask questions about what new approaches become available because of these tools.
“Those are the same questions that we asked when the Internet came about, when computer languages became more accessible and more capable of asking the kinds of questions that [the Humanities] are interested in,” says Aaron. “And now we have a tool that is able to understand natural language in a way that we can extract semantic meaning, that is very fluid, and that can be surprising.”
Once again, the Digital Humanities brings alternative tools to the study of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s work. They might be complex and at times frightening, but they are tools nonetheless: tools which cross disciplinary boundaries in the questions they help answer.
“To know that there is a deeper conversation about things like map projections or the assumptions about scale and representation of place, or the way that space and place are modified beyond this limited objective idea that a map claims is really exciting,” says Aaron. “Ebru brings a lot to that conversation; Neta’s expertise in the literature helps us to animate and orient some of the fundamental questions, and as I implement those things, then I’m able to coordinate between the group and say, ‘Are the assumptions within the code accurate and clear?’ And so, in a way, the code is ultimately part of that storytelling, but it needs someone to be able to translate between how things are implemented in technology to be able to bring that conversation back to people who are thinking about it in a theoretical or cultural lens.”
It is the nature of the Digital Humanities to be open and collaborative, says Aaron: “No one person can know everything about technology enough to be able to deploy a sophisticated Digital Humanities project — it’s just impossible.”
MAMM, then, takes collaboration to an entirely new level, asking questions of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s work that go beyond any singular person or discipline. It is not an English project, nor a Geography project, nor a Digital Humanities project — it is a true hybrid of these disciplines and more.
“Most of the time, people understand physical spaces as containers,” says Ebru. “What geographers always say is that physical spaces, any kind of spatiality, is a social and political construction.”
Having sat in on some of MAMM’s meetings and having been allowed to study this truly open and collaborative project, I’ve seen this to be true not only within the group but within each research topic they explore. Ann-Marie MacDonald’s novels and plays are not singular containers; they overlap with one another as a collected world. No individual’s reading of these stories, neither professor nor student, exists in singularity; they are in constant conversation with one another’s readings and even with the LLM’s understanding of the texts.
“We have to have a shared method and a shared approach that is productive, that is creating new knowledge,” says Aaron, “because part of what we’re doing in this group is we’re not merely seeking to verify what we already know — anyone can read a book and have an opinion as a single individual — but if we do this as a team and we have to coordinate and find consensus as a team, then the durability of the knowledge we produce is that much better.”
It seems to me that MAMM has reached out and grasped the core concept of what it means to research and learn not just in the Humanities, but in any environment.
I think A.I.’s usage is a prominent example. The development of these technologies can be frightening, but instead of being rigid and resisting, joining a long history of “humans breaking machines,” as PI Dr. Neta Gordon puts it, we might as well try to understand its strengths and weaknesses — which traits have the potential to benefit humanity and which ones we should leave behind. The same can be said of any tool, whether that’s the Internet, a calculator, or even as simple a tool as a ballpoint pen.
“You have to live in the world that you live in,” says Neta.
A.I. is here whether we like it or not, but as MAMM has proven, it can be used to advance previous conversations and develop new strategies to understand the world around us.
“What are the tools that are available to me right now?” says Neta. “How can we make use of them in a way that seems to be productive and constructive, bringing people together, and doing some interesting work?”
This doesn’t mean everything A.I. does in the Humanities is useful, but if we didn’t study these things, we wouldn’t learn the difference between what is and what isn’t.
Neta uses the example of A.I. writing. “Machine-generated writing is zero fun to read,” she says, “which is neat because that tells us something about the human, right? That ineffable spark that makes something fun to read as opposed to not fun at all.”
This is something the MAMM team understands perfectly well.
Aaron admits that the process isn’t “necessarily perfect,” and that implementing any new tool opens the door to a host of other questions. “Part of doing this work and picking up a new tool is seeing the limits of a tool, and interrogating the capabilities of large language models themselves by asking them to do something that is more typically asked of humans. […] By using them in this way, we’ll see the limits of the technology and hopefully be able to add to multiple conversations, both in the Gen. A.I. space, but also within literary analysis, within Canadian literature, and a whole range — maybe geography — we’ll be able to add to a whole range of conversations by attempting to push what we think we can do with a particular tool.”
In this way, MAMM’s outputs perfectly encapsulate the nature of research in the first place — a group of scholars across a group of disciplines exploring new tools, mapping not only the subject of their analysis, but the new methods by which they’re approaching their analyses at all.
“We’re experimenting,” says Aaron. “We’re playing, right? This is all fun.”
It all circles back to the idea of environment — in this case, not just the backdrop to MAMM’s research, but a pedagogy worth studying and disseminating within itself.
Cross-disciplinarity is only one half of what makes MAMM’s environment so special; the other half is the ethics of care that shape how these researchers interact with and appreciate one another, whether they’re students, professors or other collaborators. Indeed, without the students, MAMM wouldn’t be what it is today, and that is a topic worth exploring all on its own.
Next week in the third chapter of Mapping MAMM, I’ll examine the workplace environment and the steps Neta and her team have taken to make the project ethically and pedagogically advanced.
Until then, remember to keep an open mind. If something scares or overwhelms you, try to understand it before you brand it as a threat. When we learn something new, we become stronger for it, no matter what.
Disclaimer: As an RA employed by MAMM and Brock University, I was paid to write this series; however, my compensation was not accompanied by any assertions of bias or censorship, and the views expressed in these articles, aside from quoted material, are uniquely my own.