Digging into the Man Booker Map

Because I'm a big fan of using maps--and mapping software--as a data visualization tool, I was really excited to see Nick Sidwell's map of the Man Booker Prize in the Guardian's Books Blog. This map, showing the setting of every book that was either shortlisted or won the Booker prize since 1969, shows the global reach of those 267 books. The densest cluster is in the U.K., with South Asia, the U.S., Africa, and Western Europe following not too far behind.

While Sidwell offers some reflections on the importance of literary setting for readers, in particular how readers become attached to real or imagined locations (think platform 9 3/4), this map offers more possibilities for thinking about late twentieth and early twenty-first century fiction as an imaginative space.

And, as is often the case with large (or modest) data projects, the most suggestive possibilities come from using the map as a way to start asking questions rather than answering them. What I mean is that the map only tells us so much--the Booker Prize has spanned the globe, with some locations getting considerably more attention than others. This is interesting, but it's most interesting because it leads to other possible questions about imaginative locations and the Booker Prize. We'd have to look more closely at the novels, and the authors, to really dig into why these locations matter.

Such as:
1) How are those locations being used in the novels? Do they map onto particular political and social events?

2) What are the authors' relationships to these locations? Is the map telling us about the global reach of the prize (i.e., because it is recognizing authors from a broad range of backgrounds) or about the global imaginative reach of the authors?

3) If we were to layer the data so that we could look at the authors' national origins, travel, and places of habitation, what would that tell us?

4) What about the characters' relations to these locations? I'm reading Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire, which was longlisted but didn't make it to the shortlist. The novel takes place in Shanghai, but part of the novel's power comes from the fact that all of the characters are from somewhere else, trying find their place.

5) What would this map look like if we showed how these locations have shifted over time?

6) How representative is the Booker of modern fiction? What other groups of novels might it be useful to compare the Booker map to?

What other questions would you ask?