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This paper begins with the so-called spatial turn and goes on to examine
one of its most recent offshoots: the cartographic turn. After analysing the implications
that this turn, particularly its digital aspect, may have on a possible mappability
of literature and on the definition of an emerging field like spatial
humanities, the paper will discuss the broad disciplinary spectrum of digital
humanities and its possible convergences with this cartographic and spatialising
trend through the changes experienced by the contemporary textual condition (from
the large-scale digitation of texts to the spread of multimedia). The paper also
explores the split between an eminently quantitative approach and a qualitative one,
within both digital and spatial humanities, when tackling the study of texts, whether
they be literary or otherwise. This duality leads to the current debate between
defenders and detractors of what Franco Moretti dubbed distant reading, a critical
practice that opposes the traditional method of close reading. As the paper attempts
to argue, that distant perspective is closely linked to the cartographic turn and does
not necessarily involve using exclusively quantitative tools and giving up close
reading as a means of accessing texts. In this sense, through the underlying concept
of some literary GIS and of the emerging notion of deep or thick mapping, the paper
argues for the possibility of a telescopic reading which, as part of the approaches
and interests of spatial and digital humanities, combines quantitative and qualitative
methods and makes a distant focus (that is, cartographic) compatible with a close
reading of texts.