Geospatial Digital Technologies and the Crisis of the Literary 'Affect': Rethinking Physical Space in Online Cartographies

This paper set out to investigate physical geography as represented in online cartographies and asked whether
they relay all that we need to know about the humanity of space as described in literary narrations. Using
critical reading approaches to digital geospatiality, it argues that digital treatments of space are narrowed
down only to their virtual essentials but say little about space as a spiritual value in terms of intuitive
knowledge, and in the light of space as human time, as well as space as passage of volume, as a literary
„affect." This gives the reader to appreciate the concept of literature as not only „scripted" but also oral and
experienced. Space is not just a physical representation on a physical screen or on the printed page of a map; it
is also a literary narrative and a colonial and postcolonial habitus of (hi)story. Just like literature, it is not
created in a vacuum but is anchored in culturally lived experiences. Therefore, there is a need for an
interdisciplinary and therefore expanded approach as epitomized in postcolonial digital humanities that
supports online cartographic representations of space with new narratives of space as spirituality, time,
volume, history and culture, in order to render the digital idea of the environment into a complete aesthetic
experience.