Visualizing Poetic Space by Jonathan Thirkield

Written in the early 1300s, The Divine Comedy stands at the threshold of the Medieval and the Renaissance ages. Both its grand universal scope — Dante travels through the center of earth, up through the planets, and beyond the stars — and the intimate, vivid realism with which Dante portrays the souls he encounters, have captivated readers for seven centuries. In the Renaissance, the specificity of Dante’s geometry led figures such as Botticelli and Galileo to speculate on the exact topology of the Inferno. In the time since, artists from Bosch to Rodin to Twombly have imagined and reimagined the landscapes and populations of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. For poets and writers, the formal complexity, beauty, and radical inventiveness of Dante’s poetry has opened countless pathways for remaking and reconceiving the written word. This project draws inspiration specifically from Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, the great 20th century fabulists, each of whom regarded Dante as a touchstone for the visual and spatial imagination. This project seeks to extend these speculations, inspirations, and reimaginations into the emergent 21st century paradigms of knowledge generation: the three-dimensional interactive capabilities of the graphical user interface, and the n-dimensional dynamics of data transit. Built in JavaScript, using the Threejs 3D library and a MongoDB database, this speculative map of Dante’s poetic space serves as an environment for active, exploratory, deep, and collaborative reading of the poem. My central questions are: How can poetic space be visualized? And how can such a visualization lead us to new modes of reading, understanding, imagination, and expression?