Travelling with Mr Bloom in 1900 in Dublin and in 2024-2025 – Google Maps, Intelligent Navigation, and Large Language Models

Great literature is timeless and it takes us into a virtual space complete with route maps, footpaths, roads, rivers, mountains, and, of course people, places, animals, objects and events. So, the characters in the Irish literary classic, Ulysses, meet near Trinity College, take a tram, pop into a house/cafe, go to a river crossing, and end up somewhere fascinating in Dublin.

Mr Bloom is an important character in Ulysses. Your project ‘Travelling with Mr Bloom’ will find and use old route maps of Dublin tramways, and the few bus routes that existed in early 20th century together with the river crossings in Dublin, and layer the old map onto a modern map of Dublin: Much like modern google route maps are layered over by places of interest, rest and recreation, petrol stations and so forth.

You can annotate Mr Bloom’s journey by using ChatGPT or talking to one of the many people at TCD and outside to provide a commentary. So, when you Ulysses map is working your end-users will hear commentaries provided people and by ChatGPT. ChatGPT does produce lots of commentary on Ulysses. You might investigate how to set up your own ChatGPT model.

In this project you will learn about interactive digital map systesm, about intelligent navigation, and about large language models.

This project will create a method for animating great works of literature as there is some one travelling from one place to other at a location sometimes in the past in these great works.