Digital literary maps have become a prominent methodological approach in the field of Spatial Humanities, offering new ways to explore the relationship between narrative space and geographical representation. However, many existing literary mapping projects still largely rely on reductive cartographic logic that translates narrative space into collections of georeferenced points. While this approach works for stable and identifiable locations, it becomes problematic when literary texts operate through ambiguity, relational spatiality, or fictional geography. In such cases, narrative space exceeds the descriptive capacity of conventional cartographic models. This doctoral project proposes to rethink the epistemological status of literary maps by considering them not as neutral containers of spatial information, but as interpretive devices comparable to texts themselves. Just like any other text, the map represents a selective and rhetorical cultural artefact: it does not simply represent space but actively structures and mediates knowledge about it. Consequently, the objective of literary cartography should not be to visualises everything that can be mapped, but rather to make explicit the interpretive relationships through which narrative texts construct spatial meaning. To address this issue, the project integrates approaches from the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data to model the qualitative relationships between narrative space and geographical entities. In this perspective, the modelling of spatial data is conceived as part of a scalable reading approach, in which different levels of abstraction - ranging from textual mentions to more stable spatial constructs - can be dynamically related and analysed. Ontologies and controlled vocabularies are thus employed not merely as formal structures, but as epistemic frameworks that organise interpretive categories, preserve distinctions between degrees of referentiality, and enable the representation of spatial ambiguity as a meaningful analytical dimension. Through the use of persistent identifiers (URIs), these relations become machine-readable semantic objects that can be queried, reused, and compared across different projects. From a visual point of view, this approach leads to hybrid cartographic interfaces in which different spatial ontologies are reflected in distinct visual grammars. Real locations may appear as georeferenced points, while vague areas or narrative spatial constructs can be represented through alternative visual forms that express their epistemic status The broader aim of this research is therefore twofold: first, to establish interoperable semantic infrastructures for modelling narrative spatiality, and second, to develop visualisation strategies capable of communicating the interpretive complexity of literary space without reducing it to purely cartographic coordinates. In doing so, the project positions digital literary mapping as a form of scholarly modelling rather than a simple technique of spatial illustration.
Lorenzo Sabatino (Sun,) studied this question.