Moretti, "Graphs, Maps, Trees"

In Franco Moretti’s article “Graphs, Maps, Trees” demonstrates an interesting and unusual way to correlate literature and graphs.  Throughout his article, Moretti places graphs that display information he has talked about, such as the number of novels written over time and the rise and fall of genres throughout history.  

            This method of displaying information has some advantages.  The graphs help people who learn visually to see exactly what Moretti is trying to explain.  Likewise, this is a great way to portray information in a more mathematical way, which can appeal to people who are more interest or better adapted to understanding graphs and charts rather than long paragraphs of texts.  This approach is also beneficial because it helps to point out important points by using the graphs, which can help the reader to remember these points better.  Using graphs and charts is advantageous to keep the reader entertained and interested by help break up long portions of the text into shorter paragraphs. Moreover, this technique of displaying literary trends in graphs helps to identify normally unseen patters in the literary history.  Moretti uses this identification of patterns as proof to the claims he makes about literary history.  

            While this technique of displaying graphs in an article explaining the trends throughout literary history has its advantages there are also drawbacks.  The graphs can get confusing, especially for people who aren’t used to seeing these types of graphs in literary text.  The reader can easily get lost in translation when trying to understand the graphs and how they correlate to what Moretti is trying to explain.  These graphs can also be very misleading because they only present the numbers and data and not a proper interpretation as Moretti points out in the article. 

            Another interdisciplinary project could be comparing literature and social science.  By looking at a combination of literature and what’s happening in society, we can see whether or not changes in society track with what has been written.  In other words did the changes in society come first or did society follow the changes in the different types of literature present at the time?

In regards to different way to approach SSTLS, you could look at the book from a standpoint of a specific genre such as dystopian literature.  Then as you look at books such SSTLS you can see if you are finding an increase in this type of literature available and if it correlate with any political changes.  For example, if a decade ago you had very few of these types of literature and now you have a lot of these types are you seeing more and more changes in politics at all?