I realized that the chronology sidebars didn’t seem to get a lot of attention in the reading or class discussion. I decided to analyze the locations that were mentioned in the novel by comparing the locations in the chronology to the locations Sam and Hailey traveled through. To do this, I ran the text files of the chronology sections through AntConc for word frequency, searched for all location names, looked them up on Google Maps, and marked them on the world map in Photoshop (I had intended to do this whole process in a program, but that program decided to be unavailable at this time). I used the Hayles page “Locations in Only Revolutions” and Google Maps to add all the places Hailey and Sam went in their narratives to the map.

The locations from the chronology section with frequencies of 20 or greater are marked in yellow circles, with size corresponding to their frequency.

The locations from chronology with frequencies between 3 and 20 are marked in orange circles, with size corresponding to frequency. I neglected the locations with less that 3 frequencies as a sample set critera to save myself some time (also the spots would be practically invisible on this map).

The locations in Hailey’s narrative are marked in violet, and Sam’s in green, with arbitrarily sized cirlces because frequencies were not included on Hayle’s page.

Only Revolutions Locations

Map of locations in Only Revolutions

My intention was to see if the locations in the chronology lined up with the locations in the narrative, if Danielewski chose to include events that occurred at the places Hailey and Sam traveled through. This is something that would be too difficult to try and figure out just by reading and flipping through the pages, so I thought it would be neat to do as a machine reading project. From the visualization, the chronology locations (yellow and orange) are spread all across the world, in almost every country and in most states of the US. The narrative locations of both Sam (green) and Hailey (violet), however, made pretty distinct paths through the States that are very similar to one another. Many of their locations did lie near locations from the chronology, but it wasn’t a conclusive comparison due to the dispersed nature of the chronology locations.

As a result of this visualization, I concluded that the process of machine reading was beneficial to the close reading of Only Revolutions, but unable to stand alone. The map of locations doesn’t make much sense without the context from the narrative that is only gained by reading the pages.