The project Mapping Decadence, by Penn State student Katie Jacobs, strives to exemplify that writers in the 19th century had just as a hard time finding publishers and publishing their books as writers do today. Jacobs focused in on a specific group of writers, also known as the Decadents, to primarily do her research on. The project Mapping Decadence by Jacobs uses maps to help viewers visualize the routes and the distances writers in the late 19th century, the Decadents, used to go to and find their publishers. Through the use of map visualization, she wanted to find out if there was a correlation between a writer’s physical location and their publication histories. Jacobs utilized ArcGIS, a geographic information system to formulate her map visuals. Through her maps she was able to find trends, even though she only focused in on four main authors: Jean Lorrain, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Marcel Schwob, and Rachilde. Jacobs comments that “in the case of Rachilde, the only woman Decadent I studied, it was curious to see that every time she moved, she began a new collaboration that furthered her career.” She was able to see this through her map visualization of Rachilde.
There are 4 maps on this website, one corresponding to each writer. In my opinion, the point of view each map reflects is one who is familiar with Paris and the nearby areas. Although there is a map key that helps one find out how long each distance was from publisher to author, one simply cannot visualize the actual area with just a map. If the walk was all uphill, meaning that it was harder for an author to get to a publisher, a map is not able to show that. However, Jacobs does include the writer’s name, address, years of residence, and the works written during the author’s residency at a certain location. This allows the viewer to possibly make connections between distance of publisher and works produced, and/or between distances between different authors and how that may have affected the number of works produced.
Overall, this map reveals that distance played a huge factor in the Decadent’s publishing trends and that proximity to a publisher was a very important factor in publishing during the late 19th century. However, personally I wish there was a map compiling all of the authors’ respective data in one map so connections between authors could be more easily made– in the project right as it stands right now, there are no connections between authors on the map visualizations; this is what I believe may be obscured.
I’m a bit curious as to know why she chose to focus on those four Decadent authors – was it because there were more information for them, or because their records were better documented? Also, it’s interesting to note that the female author continued progressing her career every time she moved locations. I agree that there should also be an alternative map that can better consolidate information for all the authors, since there many be other factors such as networking and proximity to other well-known authors that can help with publishing.