All these characters, large and small, encounter one or more other characters, more or less frequently. As “data,” all characters, no matter how obscure or insignificant, count-in the sense that they have to be counted, registered. Treating the characters of a novel as “data” requires disregarding hierarchical distinctions such as “main character,” “minor character,” etc.
Technical work on the maps, characters’ database, graphs, and the site was done by Matthew Taylor and Sergei Kalugin of the Multimedia Learning Center at Northwestern University.įor any questions or comments about the contents of the site, please write to all technical questions and issues please contact Sergei Kalugin or Matthew Taylor. Research for the site was done by Michal P. At the same time, the site contains all the materials relevant to the characters’ networks and to the mapping of the novel’s Paris and is thus independent of the volume. “Visualizing Les Misérables” serves as a supplement to the MLA volume Approaches to Teaching Hugo’s Les Misérables (co-edited by Michal P. They make us see what we know, differently. Rather, they show us something that was there, in the text, all along but that in our normal process of reading remained only partially articulated. This means that they do not simply visualize something that we have already known from our normal reading process nor do they, however, reveal something totally new (say, that Jean Valjean is not the novel’s protagonist). Thus the graphs and maps have as their starting point the collection, sorting, and interpretation of relatively large data. Among the many remarkable things about Hugo’s novel are the great frequency with which the geographical city is referred to and the high number-higher than we imagine-of characters it includes.
This website provides scholars and teachers with two visual tools for interpreting and teaching Hugo’s Les Misérables: graphs of the novel’s characters and their encounters and maps of sites and itineraries mentioned or described in the novel.
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