2024-08-29

Cameron Brubacher has presented his Honors thesis entitled ‘Emotional Cartography: A Geocritical Analysis of Montréal’s Mid-20th Century Novels’ at the Canadian Association of Geographers conference, held at Memorial University in St. John’s, NL, as part of a session exploring creative GIS methodologies entitled ‘Mapping the Edges of Inclusivity’ on Saturday, August 17th.

Combining literary analysis and web-mapping, this project visualizes the emotional depictions of urban spaces as portrayed in two novels set in 1940s Montréal; Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion and Michel Tremblay’s La grosse femme d’à côté est enceinte. Following a close reading and analysis, the Atlascine platform was used to create an interactive web-map which visualizes the positive and negative emotional spaces of the two novels. This cartographic representation confirmed patterns in character’s feelings associated with certain areas of the city, and calls for the continued development of such ‘qualitative’ uses of GIS and mapping software, with the possibility of using methods from the fields of digital humanities and literary geography. The maps he has developped are not accessible publickly because of copyright restrictions.