The Origin
The Mapping Robinson Crusoe Project was created for the final project of the English 4400: Violent Voyages course at the University of Lethbridge (Fall 2025). The creator, Jocelyn McKnight, came to the idea when thinking about movement in Robinson Crusoe and other GIS/digital mapping projects. In particular, the Diogenet project, which mapped the movements of Greek philosophers, was a major inspiration.
Unfortunately, the Diogenet project is no longer active, but it used to be available at https://diogenet.ucsd.edu/map/ . Originally, the idea behind this Crusoe project was to replicate Diogenet, but here the focus is on the relationship between fictional and factual texts. As the project evolved, it turned toward an existing debate in Crusoe studies about the texts that may have inspired Robinson Crusoe. Mapping became a way to enter that debate and use computational tools to provide additional evidence.
About the project creator
It's me! Hi Dana!
Acknowledgements
While this was my project and I did all the stuff, acknowledgements are necessary.
PhD student and GIS expert, Davide Pafumi, provided invaluable guidance on how to set up the mapping code. He explained what data I needed and which libraries should be used in a project like this. Luckily for me, he already had part of the code done from a different project and I just had to adapt it.
Prof. Dana Lew provided the initial list of Crusoe sources. Those were invaluable. I am so sorry you had to see your books defiled on the map.
The design of the website is heavily inspired by the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem (Netherlands). I truly believe they have one of the best websites ever, especially for digital exhibitions. Check it out if you get the chance: Frans Hals Museum. ChatGPT 5.1 provided valuable HTML support and helped clean up my stylesheet and integrate features I really wanted, such as rounded corners on the images and the navigation bar (which is my weakest coding skill, by the way). Also thank you to everyone on Reddit who has ever posted about CSS for HTML.
Works Cited
- Blaim, A. (1996). [Review of the book The strange surprizing sources of Robinson Crusoe, by D. Fausett]. Utopian Studies, 7(2), 254–257. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20719540
- Cooper, D., Donaldson, C., & Murrieta-Flores, P. (Eds.). (2016). Literary mapping in the digital age. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315592596
- Cooper, D., & Priestnall, G. (2011). The processual intertextuality of literary cartographies: Critical and digital practices. The Cartographic Journal, 48(4), 250–262. https://doi.org/10.1179/1743277411Y.0000000025
- Dampier, W. (2005). A new voyage round the world [E-book]. Project Gutenberg Australia. (Original work published 1697) https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500461h.html
- Defoe, D. (1996). The life and adventures of Robinson Crusoe [E-book]. Project Gutenberg. (Original work published 1719) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/521
- Fausett, D. (1994). The strange surprizing sources of Robinson Crusoe. Rodopi.
- Francis, M. (2021). Towards goosepunk: A contemporary poetic treatment of Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone. Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, 8, 98–112. https://doi.org/10.54103/interfaces-08-06
- Gabay, S., & Vitali, G. P. (2019). A theatre of places: Mapping 17th c. French theatre. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR ’19). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3371140.3371146
- Godwin, F. (2014). The strange voyage and adventures of Domingo Gonsales, to the world in the moon [E-book]. Project Gutenberg. (Original work published 1638) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46591
- Jack, J. H. (1961). “A New Voyage Round the World”: Defoe’s roman à thèse. The Huntington Library Quarterly, 24(4), 323–336.
- Knox, R. (2004). An historical relation of the island Ceylon in the East Indies: Together with an account of the detaining in captivity the author and divers other Englishmen now living there, and of the author’s miraculous escape [E-book]. Project Gutenberg. (Original work published 1681) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14346
- Pauley, B. F. (2023). Attribution and the Defoe canon. In N. Seager & J. A. Downie (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of Daniel Defoe (pp. 629–644). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198827177.001.0001
- Piatti, B. (2017). Literary cartography: Mapping as method. In A. Engberg-Pedersen (Ed.), Literature and cartography: Theories, histories, genres (pp. 45–72). MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11177.003.0006
- Poole, W. (2005). The origins of Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638). Philological Quarterly, 84(2), 189–210.
- Poole, W. (2016). Kepler’s Somnium and Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone: Births of science-fiction 1593–1638. In C. Houston (Ed.), New worlds reflected: Travel and utopia in the early modern period (pp. 57–69). Routledge.
- Thell, A. M. (2013). William Dampier’s “Mixt Relation”: Narrative vs. Natural History in A New Voyage Round the World (1697). Eighteenth-Century Life, 37(3), 29–54.