A Topographical Approach to Re-Reading Books about Islands in Digital Literary Spaces

Today topography is generally associated with cartography. A topographic map locates topics—such as elevation, population, forestation, and rainfall—on a map in a graphic manner. But in classical times topography referred to geographers’ written descriptions of places. A topos is a place in discourse and a place in the world. Through topos, location and narration are inextricably linked. Susan Barton, the castaway narrator of J. M. Cotzee’s novel Foe asks: “Is that the secret meaning of the word story, do you think – a storing-place of memories?” (1986: 59). The practices of textual and visual topography aim to locate topics in memory. In Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Jay David Bolter argues that with the advent of digital writing topos are now located in the data structure of the computer (29). As such, he writes: “Electronic writing… is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places as spatially realized topics” (36). In a programming language like C, variables indeed refer to specific locations in computer memory. In a programming language like JavaScript, however, the operation of processes including memory are distributed across networks and devices. The arguments a variable refers to may be located anywhere. Once it has been referred to, through a process known as garbage collection, an argument may disappear. Or, the reference to it may disappear. JavaScript’s mode of dispersed, temporary, and transitory memory allocation is well suited to the re-reading, re-searching, and re-writing of transient, variable texts.