Case Study One

Mapping Melville in the Pacific: An Atlas

CONTEXT

As I was reading Herman Melville’s early Pacific novels, Typee and Omoo, I felt compelled to map the narrator’s movements through the islands he visited.

I started to look up the islands that were mentioned.

Several key places that Melville describes in both narratives could not be located on Google Maps for multiple reasons.

Problem

Things weren’t mapping.

So, new maps were needed.

Process

I began by trying to plot points on Google Maps, but ran into issues with place names—only some of them could be found.

One day, I started hand-drawing a map on paper while I was reading, because there were all these spatial cues that I was gathering from the texts that needed to go somewhere. That’s when I decided new maps were needed, resulting in six maps made with Adobe Illustrator.