Understanding literary space
Dr Rebecca Hutcheon’s work sits at the intersection of literary studies, spatial theory, and the digital humanities. Her research investigates how spatial thinking and digital tools together reshape our understanding of literary space, with particular attention to the readerly experience of spatial ambiguity and imaginative geography.
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Her ‘Mapping Spatial Ambiguity’ project involves developing annotation software and interactive visualisations to enable new ways of engaging with literature for academics, educators, students, and wider publics. The project investigates methods for visualising the nuanced spatial experiences in literary texts that challenge traditional GIS‑based approaches, foregrounding ambiguity as a core literary feature and developing tools to encode and explore it.
She is currently working on a new book, provisionally titled Senses of Place, which examines how literary space is conceived and perceived sensuously. Bringing together writers such as Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf, the book explores how embodied perception shapes the experience of fictional environments and the imaginative geographies they evoke.
Dr Hutcheon is also Co-Director of Litcraft, a multimodal reading resource that builds accurate literary environments in Minecraft, designed to motivate young and reluctant readers through immersive play. It is particularly effective with children who struggle with reading, whether due to dyslexia, low literacy, or language barriers, since it helps them achieve a ‘flow state’ between reading and interactive game-based tasks that mirror the narrative. This allows students to explore and enact the story world.
Litcraft has partnered with schools and libraries across the UK to deliver immersive Minecraft-based reading experiences that re-engage young readers and support literacy development. Its most recent partnership is with Cardiff Libraries.
Dr Hutcheon has also collaborated on Steampunk Sherlock Holmes, a Knowledge Exchange project that recreated Victorian London in Minecraft using Charles Booth’s 1890s poverty maps as a base. The build includes detailed recreations of a selection from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Sign of Four mapped onto real historical locations and layered with steampunk elements like Victorian airships.
Designed for older students and wider publics, the project integrates puzzle-solving and narrative exploration, offering a new experiential reading model. Key to the project’s success was the commercial partner, BLOCKWORKS, which allowed building at scale, and to launch the build commercially via the Minecraft Marketplace, expanding its reach to global audiences.