What To Do with All These Books?: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

If I had a time machine and could travel forward 150 years, I would find someone studying literary history and insist that she should read Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore if she wants to understand the complicated relationship between books and computers in 2014.

Yes, I know, that probably sounds sort of strange as a fantasy. However, as someone who studies literature, it makes sense. There is much debate about how representative any set of texts might be, whether we're talking about the canon, forgotten works that have been recently recovered, or the abundance of novels that we now have the technology to study without actually reading. The most significant realization to come out of distant reading is that we can no longer pretend that the narrow swath of books that we've traditionally studied is anything but a tiny fraction of what was read in a particular period.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, on the other hand, is beautifully representative because it absolutely captures our relation to technology in the current moment. A similar example is Sophie Kinsella's I've Got Your Number, which weaves our dependence on smart phones into its narrative structure.

Let me back up: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is a novel about seeing books - books as data, books as holding mystical secrets, books as narratives. The narrator dabbles in data visualization, and the book's central quest begins with him visualizing the "reading" (decoding, actually) patterns of the strange patrons who frequent the bookstore where he works.

I don't want to give too much away, but the tensions in the narrative come from competing ideas about what books are for. Google, and all of its computational power, is pitted against traditional and mystical ways of interacting with books. On one level, this is a narrative about whether books are information to be processed or narratives to be savored. Ultimately, what's at stake is what we want from books in the context of both large-scale digitization and the labor-intensive study that we often devote to books that are deemed worthy of unpacking. I won't tell you who wins.

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?