Literary geography and the digital: The emergence of neogeography

Over the past decade, literary scholars with an interested in the geographies of fiction have increasingly turned towards new digital mapping or geovisualisation tools, which have become increasingly available and, more importantly, amenable to humanities scholars. With the advent of the geospatial web and the release of the Google Maps API in 2005, commentators and technologists such as Randall Szott and Andrew Turner suggested the term “neogeography” to describe the types of non-professional, user-oriented, web-2 enabled mapping that these developments enabled and facilitated. Arguing for a critical approach to digital mapping, in this chapter, I outline the emergence of literary neogeography and place it not only within the context of earlier (non-digital) forms of literary geography but also within that of a broader move towards digital spatial humanities