For these maps of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad we chose to code the text up twice with two different coders (Sally Bushell and James Butler) to show the extent to which the act of coding and map-generation is subjective and to remind the viewer that the maps do not have any kind of absolute authority. The maps made by each coder are placed side by side in each section.

Sally’s maps for A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad are highly distinctive and look quite different from any of the other maps across the chronotopes. This is largely as a result of her decision to respect the cumulative nature of the text which consists of a number of short poems placed side by side with linking themes to create the whole but also existing as individual pieces in their own right.  Her mark-up therefore treats each poem as a separate “place”. This results in small space-specific clusters for particular poem-sites such as the famous “On Wenlock Edge”  In contrast, James marked up the text as if it were a single whole by determining certain key spatial areas which he denotes as: “Somewhere in Shropshire”, “London Streets” “Shropshire county”, “Ludlow Town” and the gloriously non-specific “Spaceless Thoughts”.  Some of the maps look quite similar (the underlying deep chronotopes and the chronotopes and topoi) others look very different (Syuzhet; Topoi).