ABSTRACT
As this collection demonstrates, digital literary mapping is an exciting, dynamic and growing field. From ‘distant’ to ‘deep’ cartographies, digital technologies offer a range of opportunities to recast written words and the literary worlds they project. This chapter introduces a new alternative with which we can conceptualise, understand and engage text and territory: the digital plotline. Plotlines are geographical and literary routes through the world. They are cartographic navigations that connect the page to the place and entangle them into an ongoing composition. This chapter outlines the notion of the plotline, and demonstrates its function through a digital mapping of one of Cardiff’s literary geographies. Weaving together the writings of Peter Finch and John Williams and the cityscape of Cardiff Bay, the chapter demonstrates how the real gives shape to the imaginary, and how the texts of these authors and the territories of this place entangle in practice. In the process, it engages with the website Cardiff Plotlines to illustrate this entanglement. The chapter suggests that mapping plotlines digitally offers us fresh insight into the co-ingredient connections between reader, fiction and place.
