About this Text
Although it is best known for the non-travelling portion of the novel, there is a fair bit of movement in the first part of the book. Crusoe moves between various English cities and port towns before making his way down to the west coast of Africa. He travels to Brazil and in the Caribbean area, all before being shipwrecked for the remainder of the book. When he gets off his island he returns to England and then also takes a quick trip to Portugal and Spain (Defoe, 1719).
The plot of Robinson Crusoe follows the young man from York as he longs for adventure. He leaves his home against his family's wishes and starts his adventure. After a fair bit of movement in Africa and South America, he is stranded on a deserted island where he spends the next 28 years of his life. He survives with tools and animals around him, and also comes into possession of an Indigenous man who he names Friday (1719).
The edition that was used in the mapping process of this project was from Project Gutenberg. Although this is by no means the authoritative edition of the novel, we needed a clean txt file in order to perform the computations. Other digital versions exist, but some are pdfs and the data cleaner would have to remove all the footnotes. Additionally, many pdfs of books from this period do not have OCR (optimal character recognition) and this would require running an OCR program which takes many hours and sometimes does not work.
