A Moby-Dick Gazetteer (beta) |
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As we thus rested in the shade, or rowed leisurely along, we had recourse, from time to time, to the Gazetteer, which was our Navigator, and from its bald natural facts extracted the pleasure of poetry.--Henry David Thoreau
For questions, comments, enhancement requests, or error reports, please contact me at:
info@mobydickgazetteer.org or message me on reddit at /u/joe_skidiachi_irl.
gazetteer n:
I wanted to understand the breadth and depth of the place-names Melville mentions, alludes to, or references in Moby-Dick. I wanted to be able to examine Melville's place-names at both a broad level and a specific level. I wanted answers to simple questions such as, 'How many different places does Melville reference or allude to in Moby-Dick?', and 'Which islands does Melville deem important enough to include in Moby-Dick?'. Such questions are extremely difficult to answer by simply scanning through the text. And answering one of those questions doesn't give you a jump on answering the other one-- or ANY other one. In short, I wanted a gazetteer to Moby-Dick.
Thus, I made a diligent search for an existing gazetteer for Moby-Dick. I made many web searches. I searched Abebooks.com. I searched WorldCat. I looked through almost every edition of the old Melville Society Extracts newsletters––all 124 of them in PDF format published from 1969 to 2003. I searched the Leviathan journal. I have a fleeting memory of finding a reference to one during a late-night search but, at the time, I did not save it and could never it find again. Eventually, I concluded that even if one does exist somewhere, it is very hard to find and the Moby-Dick community would not find it even if they looked.
So, I decided to take this on as a personal project. The result of the project are this web page and (probably) a self-published book containing this same information.
This Moby-Dick Gazetteer is a reference work. It is not a work of analysis or criticism.
As a reference, it allows the user to:
In addition to the technically-oriented uses listed above, the Moby-Dick Gazetteer also offers a new window into the text of Moby-Dick. By that I mean that you can dive into Melville's rich, strange, beautiful, surreal sentences without regard to the book's structure. Pick any place-name or category or type and just read the sentences. I find that the beauty and strangeness of Melvill'es language is even more apparent when these sentences are examined independent of the structure of the book, or chapter, or page, or paragraph. Explore. As Thoreau puts it, let the gazetteer serve as you navigator to Moby-Dick.
I am a geographer and Moby-Dick enthusiast. I am not a web developer or programmer, nor a Moby-Dick scholar nor academic. Some of the decisions I've made regarding place-name categories and types may seem arbitrary and/or incorrect to an expert. I welcome comments and suggestions to help improve this product over time. There are surely errors in how I coded certain place-names. Please contact me (info@mobydickgazetteer or reddit user /u/joe_skidiachi_irl) if you find any errors and provide the place-name and chapter in which it occurs, the error, why it is an error, and what the fix should be.
THIS IS A BETA VERSION. There may be many inaccuracies in this version. I have relied on some of the common sources (see sources) for help in understanding what Melville means for many place-names that are obscure or that are no longer known by the name used by Melville. But there must be more nuanced or accurate information out there that I'm not aware of. Please consider this is a work-in-progress, not a finished product.
The web interface is no-doubt a janky mess to a real web developer. If you would like to volunteer to improve it, please contact me.
The Moby-Dick Gazetteer © 2024 by William D. Wheaton
The Moby-Dick Gazetteer is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. This kind of license alows you to download, use, modify, enhance, and distribute The Moby-Dick Gazetteer . However, you may not sell it or include it in any commercial product.
If you use the website or data it in any public way, you must cite it as follows:
Website is version (beta). The database version is 0.9.
Google Sheets: The place-names and associated characteristics (sentence, page number, chapter, latitude/longitude, and so on) were originally entered into a Google Sheets table.
MySQL: The table was exported to .CSV and imported into a MySQL database on a web server.
PHP: The database/website interaction is coded in PHP.
I intend to self-publish a print version of the Moby-Dick Gazetteer for my own purposes. I have a mockup and I think it looks good. Once it is complete, I'll make it available somewhere on a print-on-demand service in case others are interested.
For questions, comments, enhancement requests, or error reports, please contact me at:
info@mobydickgazetteer.org, or message me on reddit at /u/joe_skidiachi_irl.