LitScape: when a city erases its landmarks, the novels become the archive
Bar Beach is buried under Eko Atlantic. Ilojo Bar was demolished despite being a listed monument. LitScape turns seventy years of Nigerian fiction into a map of the Lagos that no longer exists.
Lagos keeps demolishing its own memory. Bar Beach is buried under Eko Atlantic. Ilojo Bar came down in 2016 despite being a listed national monument. What remains of those places is often nothing more than a paragraph in a novel.
That archive is real but unusable. A researcher who wants to know how Lagosians described Bar Beach across seventy years has to read seventy years of novels and hold the answer in their head. The knowledge exists; it just cannot be asked a question.
There was a harder problem underneath. Making this searchable at all means letting software read the corpus and propose connections — and the moment software proposes a literary claim, someone has to decide whether scholarship can stand on it.
We inverted the unit of analysis. Libraries organise by book; LitScape organises by place. Click Bar Beach and you get every novel that named it, oldest first, each with the passage and the page — a single location read across seven decades of writing.
Automation does the reading, but it is never given the last word. Everything the pipeline proposes is marked unverified and shown as a candidate, visibly separate from a claim. Only the researcher can promote one, and that rule sits in the data model rather than in a review process, so an extraction error cannot quietly become a citation someone else builds on.
Fiction rarely gives coordinates. Rather than dropping a confident pin and implying a precision the text never had, every place is drawn with its actual uncertainty — a tight circle where the novel is exact, a wide one where the reference is symbolic. The reader can see how firmly a place is known.
The corpus is under copyright, so it never reaches the internet. Full texts stay on the researcher's machine; only short quotations for criticism and teaching are ever published.