Engaging the spatial imaginaries of literary texts through digital technologies is an area of endeavor for the digital humanities which has proved itself particularly conducive to provoking critical reflections on the limitations of software. Humanities scholars who use spatial applications have found common ground with geographers who have been engaged for some decades in problematizing the positivistic assumptions such technologies rest on, and conceiving alternative practices through which to deploy spatial technologies interpretively in ways that unsettle conventional representations of lived experience, rather than conducting spatial analyses that are anchored in quantitative geographical information [Kwan and Knigge 2006, p. 1999].

Aligning itself with these alternative practices from critical geography, the project I report on in this article comes out of efforts to use digital mapping technologies to analyze literary texts whose spatial imaginaries trouble the boundary between the Euclidean space of the empirical world and the imaginary spaces of fictional worlds. Scholarship in the digital humanities has long been occupied by this problem (see for example [Drucker 2011]), but GIS technologies and neogeographical applications have proven themselves ill equipped to address it. The fundamental challenge, which emerges in attempts to construct even the simplest of point maps from literary narratives, lies in the fact that most such texts, even ones appearing to be squarely anchored in a realist mode, shift between the empirical world and fictional worlds, with the division between the real and the fictional being far from easily delineated. As the text recedes historically from the reader, the distinction becomes more difficult to keep in view, and anchoring textual references to the spatial co-ordinates a GIS requires becomes increasingly untenable.

The tension between the fluidity of textual meanings and the putative rigidity of the data structures underpinning spatial software does not, however, mean that the endeavor to bring the two together is futile. Indeed, as Susan Brown points out, navigating this tension in ways that bring the insights of humanities scholarship about the provisional and contingent nature of categories to bear on the practical exigencies of working with data is one of the core tasks for the digital humanities. Given that the classificatory actions needed to structure data are “not just discursively but operationally performative,” removing information from the environments in which it was originally produced can potentially distort, silence and obscure some aspects of it, but at the same time enables those data to be queried, retrieved, transformed, and exposed [Brown 2020, p. 167]. It is a truism that making maps and carrying out spatial analysis reduces the complexities of the world and therefore requires inevitable compromises between retaining those complexities and analytical utility: What emerges as valuable from this tension are the consequences of those methodological choices. Moreover, as technocapitalist dominance intensifies, and the algorithmic tendrils threaded through the technologies of communication and bureaucratic state control come to govern more of daily life, the more pressing the imperatives are to critique and intervene into these clashing epistemologies. As Brown observes, “[t]he interlocking relations of classification to scientism and informational infrastructures is precisely why DH must not relinquish it” [Brown 2020, p. 167].

Spatial humanities projects which confront these epistemological questions by interrogating GIS and other mapping technologies and the methodologies they call forth can be seen in the light of these broader stakes. Within literary studies, methodological innovation has tended to emerge from more historically-oriented GIS projects, as these are more likely to have data which can be readily georeferenced [Black, MacDonald, and Black 1998] [MacDonald and Black 2000]. However, there are some projects which have found ways to keep the narrative, stylistic, symbolic, perspectival, and other literary qualities of their objects of study in view while using maps to represent some aspect(s) of a literary text. As part of the Mapping the Lakes project, Ian Gregory and David Cooper used an “emotion mapping” approach to the travel writings of Gray and Coleridge, coding passages according to their affective intensity and then generating maps from these ratings in order to show the varying affective responses of the two poets to the landscapes of the Lake District in the British Isles [Gregory and Cooper 2010]. The Literary Atlas of Europe project developed an intricate data model that distinguished between different kinds of places (settings, projected space, zones of action, markers, and routes), the mode of projection (remembering, dreaming, longing, or evoking), the relationship between literary space and geospace (imported, transformed, invented, imagined, synthesized, or shifted), and the function performed by spatial references in a text (for instance serving as simple scenery vs. carrying symbolic connotations). Drawing on work within the field of information visualization to represent uncertainty through elements such as color, transparency, and animations, this project produced multiple visualizations of place in literary texts, and layered them over conventional cartographic base maps (see [Reuschel and Hurni 2011]. In the Chronotopic Cartographies project, Sally Bushell et al. used the concept of literary topology and eschewed GIS-based tools in favor of other forms of graphical representation such as “topoi maps,” which took places which were linked in narratives and represented them as a network diagram. Generating topoi maps from the perspective of different protagonists in Frankenstein and comparing them revealed the extent to which the novel’s character and identity are spatially inflected [Bushell et al. 2022, p. 50]. A fourth example, Alex Christie and Katie Tanigawa’s “z-axis” approach to mapping modernist Paris, started with a map on a flat plane and used the third dimension to distort it according to where characters spend more time, such that a cartographic representation of, for instance, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood bulges and dips so as to defamiliarize the map of Paris in ways that resonate with the ways Barnes’s novel subverts and destabilizes heteronormativity and social convention [Christie and Tanigawa 2016].

In contrast to these thoughtful and methodologically innovative projects, the bulk of literary mapping endeavors tend to employ point maps in a more simplistic way and rely on neogeographical tools such as Google Maps or ESRI’s proprietary ArcGIS Story Map platform to construct them. Bushell et al. point to a common fallacy underlying many such projects: “the assumption that if a fictional text uses real-world names then the fictional representation of place corresponds directly to the real-world place and can be mapped onto it” [Bushell et al. 2022, p. 43]. To collapse a literary place into a point on the earth’s surface represented by a latitude and longitude reference would be to fall into naïve realism, and to cross what Bakhtin characterizes as the “sharp and categorical boundary line between the actual world as source of representation and the world represented in the work” [Bakhtin 1981, p. 253]. It is, of course, possible to use point maps in more nuanced ways, and one project that does so is Caitlin Burke and Patricia Herron’s “Frankenstein Map,” built with Story Map, in which almost as much screen space is given to contextual information, quotations from Mary Shelley’s novel, and images such as paintings as to the map markers [Burke and Herron n.d.].

But it remains the case that the most compelling discussions of how texts engage with spatial elements and use them as specifically literary resources are resolutely grounded in discursive rather than cartographic or visual modes. One example is furnished by Paul Saint-Amour, building on work by Eric Bulson and Jon Hegglund, who uses the concept of countermapping developed within sociology to persuasively elaborate, without any actual maps of Dublin, the ways in which James Joyce writes back to, and undermines the epistemological frameworks set up by the Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland produced as a tool of imperial governance by the British. Glossing a passage from Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man in which the protagonist, Stephen, overlays a rich set of associations on places on his daily walk through Dublin to university lectures — countermapping a “reeking slobland” as a “silverveined cloister,” for instance — Saint-Amour observes how Stephen’s subjective traversal of such places “transubstantiates them into sites of revitalizing aesthetic experience for the colonial artist-intellectual who is able to read widely and feel boldly” [Saint-Amour 2024, pp. 99–100], thereby connecting spatiality to one of the novel’s key preoccupations. There is a clear argument and analytical payoff here, in contrast to the many point maps of Joyce’s Dublin, Woolf’s London, or any number of other digital literary maps that now litter the internet, in partially or entirely deprecated form.

In this article, I seek to extend the lines of enquiry opened up by these projects and others like them to suggest some further ways that spatially-minded literary critics might think outside the GIS box, while leveraging the methodological innovations that digital tools and fabrication technologies open up for new forms of tactile and visual engagement. I do so by presenting an approach which does not collapse the real and the imaginary in its presentation of spatiality and avoids eliding one of the key qualities that makes literary space worth investigating, i.e. its treatment of spatial references as something other than positivistic, Euclidean entities. Critical attention to the analytical value of digital mapping is an increasingly pressing concern as generative AI has dramatically lowered the technical barriers to entry for digital mapping, enabling users to generate geoparsing scripts and online visualizations whose accuracy cannot be guaranteed, and which are likely to exhibit biases reflecting the Anglocentrism and other limitations of LLM training data. In this context, scholars in the spatial humanities need to continue to think critically about the epistemological value of moving from a text to a map and back again, and about the tools we are using to do so. Such an approach is aligned with a broader project within critical geography to repurpose digital mapping applications for critical ends and to interrogate the assumptions underlying technologies for spatial analysis that originated in military technologies for surveillance, espionage, and waging war. Furthermore, as the rising prominence of genres such as speculative fiction evince a desire to think beyond the scale of the human to the world-systems and structures of the global and the planetary — an imperative driven by the need to meet the challenges of the climate crisis and resist the expansion of technocapitalist power across borders — this project seeks to rise to the challenge of finding ways to engage with the workings of space and scale through cultural and literary analysis.

One way in which the spatial, scalar or dimensional aspects of a literary text can be decoupled from the geographical and evoked without being constrained to an interface or a screen is to construct a three-dimensional model which can be fabricated and handled as a tangible object. By incorporating into the design both the words comprising a text and a rendering of a spatial quality depicted in that text (such as size) and the way this quality changes as the text unfolds, this object can be used to simultaneously represent and defamiliarize the workings of spatiality. To illustrate how this works, I have used the poems of Emily Dickinson as an exemplar. Dickinson is an apt writer for such an endeavor, as her poems are unmappable in conventional cartographic ways: They are almost entirely devoid of specific geographical references, but many are preoccupied with literal and metaphorical space, and her work is steeped in a vocabulary of scales, sizes, and spatial contrasts. As Helen Vendler observes, there is “an almost illimitable set of templates” onto which Dickinson maps her poems, including “a circular geometry of center, circumference, and the ‘spokes’ connecting them”, “a vertical scale extending from ‘under the beetle’s cellar’ to the stars” and “a horizontal scale extending from the East of dawn to the West of sunset”, with Dickinson disorienting the reader by mapping these templates over the top of each other, and “leap[ing] from plane to plane” [Vendler 2010, p. 10]. These leaps and shifts between different scales form part of a poem’s metaphorical resources as they interrogate abstractions such as existentialism, human attempts to access the numinous, and the relationship between the human and animal worlds. It is these shifts, and their potential intersection with more conventional ways of reading a poem, that can be captured and visualized in a three-dimensional form that can then be 3D-printed, which I call a plotspace.

A plotspace is a three-dimensional rendering of a quality in a text which changes as that text progresses and which can be plotted as the text unfolds. It begins as a design in the virtual space of computer-assisted design (CAD) software (Figure 1), and can also take physical form if 3D-fabricated (Figure 2).

The plotspaces discussed below were printed in PLA plastic and resin, and milled out of metal (Figure 3). Evoking the shape of a book or, in their curved instantiations, a stage, each plotspace includes the text of a poem engraved or embossed on its inner face(s), alongside a curve which plots the changing scales of the entities in the poem. This curve extends out from its face in a three-dimensional wave-like form which emphasizes the shifts in scale in the poem, with the intention of prompting and provoking viewers to think about what is illuminated by reading the text of the poem in conjunction with the three-dimensional form which 3D fabrication makes possible. As I will go on to show, encountering a poem in this unconventional way — in which the fluidity and dynamism of circulating meanings are captured and fixed in a static form — spurs different modes of engagement for both reader and maker, and opens up new ways to think about how reading can be understood in terms of the relationship between product (text and 3D-fabricated object) and process (interpretation and fabrication). Insights have the potential to emerge from different stages in the process, including the translation of the poem into a plot, the virtual design, the fabrication of the material object, and the interpretation of the material object, as well as the interactions of the various stages.

The term plotspace plays on the double meaning of plot as a noun (i.e. what narratology designates syuzhet) and plot as a verb (i.e. to make a graph), while space designates both the physical space of the three-dimensional object, and the imagined spatiality of the text being represented. This relationship between the noun and the verb — the entity and the process by which it is constituted — is central to the way a literary text does its work. Reading a poem, for example, involves identifying particular “things,” for example imagery, metrical patterning, voice, lineation, and so forth, but it is from the interactions between these elements — a process that unfolds over time — that meanings arise. Rather than seeking to freeze or capture a single meaning, given that no two readers will agree on how to quantify space or scale in a poem, a plotspace acts as a spur to interpretation: a tangible object that provokes and defamiliarizes.

In functioning as a ground on which these two aspects — processes and entities — can be brought together, plotspaces inhabit similar conceptual territory to Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, which he describes in The Dialogic Imagination as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” [Bakhtin 1981, p. 84]. Bakhtin frames his explanation of the chronotope — a theoretical construct he applies to literary genres spanning multiple languages, and extending back to the second century C.E. — in material and bodily terms:

In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. [Bakhtin 1981, p. 84]

For Bakhtin, it is the rich referential and social world conjured within a novel that allows the connections between time and space to “thicke[n],” “tak[e] on flesh,” and become “fused into one … concrete whole.” If characters are an essential part of how the connection between time and space in a novel takes on flesh, then a plotspace enables the “thickening” of that connection with respect to a genre that does not rely on characters in the same way, and by employing the kind of spatial and concrete form to which Bakhtin’s formulation gestures. This form also resonates with the graphical dimension — the “intersection of axes” — of Bakhtin’s concept, one he reports borrowing from mathematics “for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely).” Seen in this light, the plotspace can be understood as taking up Bakhtin’s convictions about the inseparability of place and time, and bringing them together in ways that are not only entirely different to a novel, but whose fusion into a concrete whole can, via 3D fabrication technology, be brought into the material world for users to engage with in tactile as well as visual modes.

Before getting to the detail of how the plotting and 3D fabrication is done, it is worth situating plotspaces in the light of other digital humanities projects which take literary and/or historical texts, identify an aspect of interest within them, and plot changes to that aspect over time in visually arresting ways. These include sentiment analysis scores (Figure 4) or the changing prominence of a topic in a topic model, something which is especially effective in textual genres whose sections unfold over time such as diaries (Figure 5) and periodicals (Figure 6).

Like Bakhtin’s chronotope, these visualizations are suited to narrative forms to which chronology is important, as they make it easy to see change over time. The utility of applying a similar visualization approach to poetic forms where chronological progression may not be as important as, say, imagery, voice, or metrical patterning is perhaps less clear. What is the value of “freezing” a poem into a sculptural form when the resulting static quiddity appears to stand so clearly in tension with the mobile and mutable meanings that circulate within a poem? If, as Reuschel and Hurni maintain, the drive to map individual texts is fostered by the desire “to get a deeper, analytical insight into the spatial structure of a story” [Reuschel and Hurni 2011, p. 293], then plotspaces respond to the same desire for insights into the spatial workings of texts, but those texts need not be oriented around stories. Rather, what they emphasize, and make tactile, are the dramatic differences in scale that are contained in a single poem, which in the case of Dickinson’s work can range from “the atom” to “the universe.” A plotspace not only visualizes these differences but registers the often vertiginous shifts in a poem between these scales. As I will go on to argue, visualizing these shifts has the capacity to contribute to a fuller understanding of Dickinson’s poems, especially given their resistance to being tied down to quantifiable measurements. In presenting visualizations such as these, which give no concrete quantitative information but allow the shape of a poem’s swoops and plunges between scales to be perceived all at once, I suggest that such shifts provide Dickinson with the metaphorical resources to represent and interrogate existential themes. In this way, the plotspace does not so much shut meanings down as enable additional layers of meaning to become, literally, visible.

More broadly, plotspaces also contribute to the project of defamiliarization that Johanna Drucker identifies as an engine of radical critique with the power to reveal the constructed and interpretive qualities of realist models of knowledge, particularly those from scientific fields whose biases are rhetorically concealed by information visualization forms that carry with them the aura of epistemological authority. Drucker points specifically to technologies for mapping — GIS mapping, Google maps — alongside other familiar information visualization genres such as statistical charts and bar charts as “a kind of intellectual Trojan horse, a vehicle through which assumptions about what constitutes information swarm with potent force” [Drucker 2011]. A provocative visualization such as a plotspace — even one which might be felt by some to get things wrong about the poem on which it is based — can perform this kind of perspectival and epistemological defamiliarization that, for Drucker and other critics such as Susan Brown, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, goes to the heart of humanistic critique [Brown 2020] [D'Ignazio and Klein 2020].

To transform Dickinson’s poems — themselves interpretable as spatial arguments — I chose a selection in which space or scale featured consistently enough across the whole text to be quantified and plotted. I looked not only for references to objects with material or corporeal reality whose size could be easily specified (human beings, insects, mountains), but also for metaphorical and metaphysical entities whose size, large or small, might be inferred (e.g. paradise, the heavens, “the Gambrels of the Sky”).

I then gave each poetic line a numerical rating and created a plot of those ratings showing change along the horizontal axis as the text progresses. In theory, any text and any division will work, though in practice, choosing a short poem and dividing it into poetic lines is the most practically workable, especially when a two-dimensional rendering on the screen is translated into a three-dimensional material object. The numerical rating in this project designated size, given that I was interested in poems from Dickinson’s oeuvre in which scale and space were thematically prominent, but other aspects could also be chosen. Generating these plots is, obviously, a highly interpretive process, as the examples below demonstrate.

For the vertical axis, I used a log scale from 10 picometers through to 1015 m, in the manner of the 1977 “Powers of Ten” documentary by Charles and Ray Eames, which starts at the human level and zooms out to progressively larger objects (a field, a city, a country, and so on), and then zooms in to progressively smaller ones. I then rated each line of each poem with the number corresponding to the size of what I deemed to be the line’s main entity, designating for example 10 picometers as roughly equivalent to “an Atom” (a rating of -11), 100km as “the sea” or “the skies” as seen from the ground (a rating of 12), and 108 m as “the firmament” (a rating of 8). These ratings were then used to produce plots for each poem showing how the size of what might be thought of as its spatial imaginary varied over its lines.

To illustrate how the process works, consider “A dew sufficed itself,” a poem of Dickinson’s which uses light and water imagery, and the relative sizes of a drop of dew, a leaf, the sea, and the sun to explore the relationship between significance and insignificance. The poem begins with a personified dewdrop musing on its sense of its own inconsequentiality in relation to a leaf, an object only one step above it in the scalar order. The drop then disappears as the viewfinder pulls back to take in much larger phenomena: the sun moving across the sky, and water evaporating to be condensed back into rain and returned to the sea. Although the individual drop of dew recedes from view as the scale shifts, the water cycle described in the latter half of the poem makes clear its significance in the wider scheme of things, but the poem tempers any facile or bathetic resolution with the uneasy tension between the drop of dew’s capacity for existential reflection and its “eternally unknown” destiny. Not only, then, are the relative sizes of entities in the poem — at least in this reading — crucial to understanding its overall meaning, but the contrast between sizes, and the sharpness of that contrast, are also key to the way the poem conveys its meanings.

This process of translating the poem into a plot illustrates one of the analytical uses of the plotspace, i.e. reading a text with this spatial coding schema in mind. Rather than deterministically limiting a line to a single reference, however, I suggest that the ratings can be understood as the outcome of a process in which multiple options are weighed and related to the perceived message of the poem as a whole. Reading for size and scale in this way acts as a discipline of sorts, akin to how a particular theoretical frame will serve to foreground some elements in a text that a reader might not otherwise have noticed, while necessarily relegating other elements to the background. One difference between a theoretical framing and a spatial rendering of scalar shifts is that the latter can be transmuted into a form that can be apprehended in both visual and tactile ways, and it is to the ramifications of this transmutation, and the move from two to three dimensions, that I now turn.

Work at the intersection of literary studies and information visualization demonstrates that spatial metaphors can furnish a resonant repertoire with which to represent developments in literary and cultural history (see for example [Goldstone and Underwood 2013] [Goldstone and Underwood 2014] [Gavin et al. 2019] [Underwood and So 2021].) It has, however, proved more difficult for literary visualizations to cross from two dimensions into three, and some of the most experimental and deformative scholarly projects which engage three-dimensional forms such as the Z-axis modernism project mentioned earlier have remained constrained to the screen. As Bethany Nowviskie suggests, moving content from the screen “into our embodied, place-based, mobile lives” [Nowviskie 2016] via technologies for locative and augmented reality, and bringing it into material and permanent existence through consumer-accessible 3D fabrication technologies has the capacity to open up generative possibilities for literary studies, something already well in evidence in fields such as archaeology and public history. While scholars and practitioners in the fields of editing, paleography, archives, and book history are used to confronting the material forms of the media through which texts travel, this does not hold consistently across the range of subfields that make up literary studies, and it is to literary studies that Nowviskie directs her challenge: “What new, interpretive research avenues will open up for you, in places of interesting friction and resistance, when you gain access to the fresh, full circuit of humanities computing — that is, the loop from the physical to the digital to the material text and artifact again?” [Nowviskie 2016, pp. 179–180]. In their 3D-fabricated form, then, plotspaces represent an attempt to respond to Nowviskie’s call, some dozen years after she initially issued it in a paper given at the 2013 MLA Convention, as they bring into view new interpretive avenues for the possibilities critical making might hold for literary studies.

At the same time as affirming these possibilities, I want to hold at a distance the techno-solutionist rhetoric that is sometimes attendant on 3D printing, along with the fabricated artefacts — the smoothness and shininess of which belie the multiple failed and glitchy progenitors on whose development their own apparent flawlessness depends — which serve as apt metaphorical distillations of this kind of utopian thinking. As anyone who has spent time doing 3D fabrication in a makerspace will know, resistance in the materials is ubiquitous. But, as Nowviskie points out, when William Morris’s celebrated phrase is invoked it is accompanied only rarely by the line that follows it: “And it seems to me, too, that with a machine, one’s mind would be apt to be taken off the work at whiles by the machine sticking or what not” (qtd. in [Nowviskie 2016, p. 177]). Whereas for Morris, the “sticking or what not” stops the flow of artistic creation, I suggest that what this getting stuck-ness enables is the potential for new insights, ideas, and critiques to emerge. In moving from two dimensions to three, then, I seek to get beyond the representational and the figurative to explore how the glitchy and subversive possibilities of 3D fabrication might lend themselves to renderings of literary texts that illuminate more than just those texts. First, however, I set out the processes involved in moving from the poetic plots described above to 3D-printed physical objects.

To move from the two-dimensional plot to a three-dimensional object, I used the CAD software package Autodesk Fusion 360 to construct three flat planes joined at a single vertex to make the three faces of a cube.[1] I traced the line of the plot created in an earlier step onto the inner face of one of the vertical walls, and — depending on the material chosen for fabrication — either engraved text into, or extruded text out of, one or both of the vertical faces. To give three-dimensional volume to the plot, i.e. to bring the curved line of the plot out from the vertical face and create three-dimensional “waves” falling down from it to meet the horizontal face, I used Fusion’s loft function, which allows for different shapes (or “profiles”) to be seamlessly blended together. This involved creating rails: guide lines to indicate how the waves will be shaped, from a gentle curve that is close to a diagonal line, to a more pronounced concave curve (Figure 8), with convex curves and straight lines also possible. The decision about the shape of the rails is an interpretive one, and, as discussed below in relation to the “I started Early — Took my Dog” and “It sifts from Leaden Sieves” plotspaces, can be chosen to resonate with aspects of poetic meaning. Figure 9 shows the different parameters the user can choose during the process of lofting, including whether to treat a rail as a guide or as a centerline.[2]

As Figure 1 shows, the resulting shape resembles an open book which enables a user to see the text of the poem at the same time as the visual rendering of the shifts in space and scale, while also allowing them to apprehend these shifts by holding the object and running one’s fingers over it. I made many design decisions — for instance about whether the lofted curve would be shaped in a concave or convex way — based on my own reading of the poem, and I discuss some of these below. The most important decision, however, was the initial choice of the poem, given that it needed to be able to fit onto the walls in its entirety. I was therefore constrained not only to relatively short poems, but ones whose scalar shifts, once plotted, were sufficiently dramatic to make for interesting shapes, and which left sufficient room for the poem to be printed. In the era of endless digital scroll, encountering space as a constraint is relatively unusual, and in this context served as a reminder of Dickinson’s extraordinary skill in packing a great deal of meaning into poems that are often very short.

As I designed more plotspaces, I continued to notice things in the poems that I might not otherwise have paid attention to had I not been building 3D models of their shifts in size and scale. One example is the poem “I started Early — Took my Dog,” which begins at the human scale, zooms out to “the Sea,” then back to the human scale of “Mermaids,” then out to “Frigates,” and so on, creating a recurrent series of regular shifts. The resulting wave shapes evoke the waves chasing the narrator, and they can be easily seen in the plotspace (Figure 10).

There are, however, other ways to interpret the insistent back-and-forth motion that are more menacing. The speaker’s unsettling encounter at the shore is gendered: The sea, presented as a masculine persona, threatens to “eat [her] up” and pursues her as she retreats. The overtones of sexual threat are evident from conventional close reading: images such the tide that goes “past my Apron – and my Belt / And past my Boddice – too” and the way the speaker’s shoe “overflows with Pearl” are startlingly visceral. But what I did not notice until I undertook the coding and plotting was the regularity of the shifts: The zooming in and out which the wave shapes of the plotspace make so clearly visible. It is not just the shifts but their regularity which emphasizes the overtones of latent sexual violence, and this patterning of the poem’s perspectival shifts, and what their rapid back and forth might evoke, is brought out by the visual rendering.

When I lofted these curves in CAD software, I made a decision to keep them quite bony and austere to convey the sense of menace that I took from my reading of the poem. When 3D printed in PLA plastic the curves were, indeed, pleasingly severe. But if this severity could be readily perceived with the eyes, its material reality required more effort to contend with, given the amount of additional filament that was needed as support for each of the waves. After the model had finished printing, I spent a lot of time wedging needlenose pliers into the tiny crevices between waves in the attempt to pull out as many of these scraps of filament as I could, something a temporary hand injury made even more difficult as I could not grasp the pliers as tightly as I ordinarily would. Trying to get sandpaper into the gaps to smooth away the remnants of filament support was no easier. While the design decisions made on the screen had been hermeneutically satisfying and achieved with no more effort than changing parameters, entering numbers and redrawing some curves several times, then, encountering the material instantiation of these design decisions led me to notice in a bodily way the implications of the difference between these curves and the gentler ones of a poem such as “A dew sufficed itself.”

The ratings that give rise to the shape of the plot in Figure 10 are, evidently, highly subjective. Readers might, for instance, disagree on the size of entities such as “Frigates” (which I deemed bigger than humans or a house, but not as big as “the Sea”), the key entity in a line of poetry to which a scale rating should be applied, or the meaning of an allusive term like “the Basement.” Beyond the specifics of any individual reading, however, is the methodological widening that is prompted by the shift to working in non-textual modes: the way that the processes of rating, plotting, and visual designing drew out this patterning which I was then able to adduce as additional evidence in service of a reading which brought to light multiple dimensions of the gendered violence at which the poem hints. Constructing a plotspace and giving it material form is not about determining the single way a poem should be read. Rather, it takes one interpretation, gives it physical form, and stands back to ask what is illuminated by the act of making.

There were other ways in which bringing a plotspace off the screen and into the physical world were generative, as decisions about how to shape its form interacted with other choices such as the material with which to print it, and with my interpretation of a poem’s circulating textual meanings. In “It sifts from Leaden Sieves” (Figure 11), I elected to make the curves concave because, printed in white PLA, they evoked the shapes of snowy slopes and snowdrifts. Once printed, the plotspace gave tactile expression to the striking contrast between the fluffy, natural qualities associated with snow and the way the poem imagines it falling out of industrial metal sieves: The curves of the model printed in white PLA (polylactic acid) do somewhat resemble snow-covered slopes until, in a further act of defamiliarization, touch reveals their smooth artificiality.

One of the affordances of a 3D-printed plotspace is that it is simultaneously small enough to be carried around, turned over in one’s hands and passed to others, while being large enough for a poem to be inscribed on its surfaces alongside a spatialized rendering of its shifts. Occupying this middle ground allows it to provoke interpretation in particular ways. While poems also provoke interpretation, the visual and tactile dimensions of the plotspace bring other elements into the hermeneutic mix, complicating the reading of the poem by setting up a dialectical relationship between its potential meanings and those of the material object in one’s hands.

In this way, plotspaces can be understood as what Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell term “hermeneutical instruments” and “telescopes for the mind”: digital artifacts capable of casting new light on the objects of humanistic enquiry. Beyond their potential for illumination, such digital artifacts enable the production of theories through which other phenomena can be better understood. “We might,” they suggest, “consider digital artifacts as ‘theory frameworks’ for interpreting, in the same way that Jonathan Culler views Foucault’s theoretical interventions” [Ramsay and Rockwell 2012, p. 79]. Indeed, “digital artifacts like text analysis and visualization tools are theories in the very highest tradition of what it is to theorize in the humanities, because they show us the world differently” [Ramsay and Rockwell 2012, p. 79]. If Dickinson’s poems, first encountered by many readers at school, have become sclerified into firmly canonical texts, plotspaces offer a way to temporarily disrupt the familiar contours of their meaning, and to see them differently: to foreground spatial elements over other aspects; to call attention to rapid shifts in size; and to think about the structure of a poem not in terms of familiar elements such as metrical regularity, lineation or the number of lines in a stanza, but in terms of how references to space and scale may differ considerably from the start of a poem to the end, or what an oscillation between two different scales might reveal about the other meanings circulating in a text.

In Klein’s reading, Peabody’s floor rug visualizations provoke a different mode of sensory engagement, asking “viewers to reconsider the actual position of their bodies in relation to their objects of knowledge” and thereby inviting physical engagement with what one is seeing and what it might mean [Klein 2017]. A plotspace also invites bodily involvement: picking it up and turning it over in one’s hands to see it from multiple angles recalls the process of interpreting a poem, which is similarly iterative and unfolds over time as aspects of the meaning which emerge from one poetic feature are then brought to bear on other potential meanings arising out of other features. If, to adapt I.A. Richards’s phrase, a text is a machine to think with, then “the machine sticking and what not” — a line on an otherwise smooth plastic face indicating where the amount of filament was underestimated and more has had to be loaded into the printer, strands of plastic support that stubbornly resist the ability of human hands to remove them, or the legibility of words easily perceived on a screen which is confounded by the limitations of layer heights and nozzle size on a 3D printer — opens up opportunities for insight which the familiarity born of habituation might otherwise close off. As the design researcher Sara Hendren observes, you “build something so that you can think with that thing” [Hendren 2025].

This project began as an attempt to use visualization methods to understand the workings of space and scale in poems in ways not tied to Euclidean geometry and positivistic cartography. As it proceeded, its broader implications emerged in ways that swiftly outpaced its disciplinary beginnings: the ways that our increasing reliance on and immersion in digital technologies makes it too easy to ignore the material implications of their use. A plotspace, in its translation from poem to screen to material object, speaks to Alan Liu’s call for those in DH to continue asking “[h]ow the digital humanities advances, channels, or resists today’s great postindustrial, neoliberal, corporate, and global flows of information-cum-capital” [Liu 2012, p. 491]. As literary studies pursues theoretical vocabularies and frameworks appropriate to grappling with materiality at a moment when we are confronted with hyperobjects like climate catastrophe, accelerating extinction rates, and planetary forces that not only challenge conceptualization but push forms like narrative and poetry to their limits, we will need ways to think outside the disciplinary box as a way of approaching scale, as well as keeping in view the increasing amounts of energy, water, and resources that digital technologies require. Poems, that most ephemeral of literary forms — often so short that they can be memorized and the need for mediating interfaces can be avoided completely — might seem an unintuitive way to approach these questions. But, transmuted into plotspaces, they can become a vehicle for reconsidering the position of one’s body to cultural artefacts and to see with fresh eyes the material, and the technologies, with which those artefacts are made.

I am very grateful to Peter Bentley, who runs the Edinburgh Futures Institute Makerspace at the University of Edinburgh, for his expertise and patience in teaching me to use the machines for milling, resin printing, and 3D printing which were essential to this project. I also want to acknowledge Ruth Buckley and the staff of uCreate, the makerspace at the University of Edinburgh library, for their help and guidance.