Mapping some Familiar Mark Z. Danielewski Tweets

A few days ago, I stumbled across a Twitter conversation about House of Leaves. That’s generally enough to get my attention. The people involved were an added enticement. But the conversation among Jesse Stommel, Chuck Rybak, Sean Michael Morris, and Paul Benzon took a different direction when Paul asked, if anyone had “theories on what’s up with the MZD numerical tweets?”

This was the first that I had heard anything about this, so I quickly checked out Mark Z. Danielewski’s tweet stream. And it was very quickly apparent what Paul was talking about. MZD’s last 8 tweets have been a string of numbers. When I looked at them, my immediate thought was that they had to be linked to The Familiar, his 27-volume serial novel that should start being published in 2014. My second thought was that these numbers looked suspiciously like latitude and longitude.

I had a little bit of time that morning, so I quickly ducked into Google Maps to see what I could find out. The first of his numerical tweets appeared on 17 January 2013: 48-371204-9-7265. I decided to replace the dashes with commas and periods, and entered these coordinates: 48.371204,9.7265. A spot in the forest southwest of Schelklingen, Germany was the result. Easy enough. The second site was in Alles-sur-Dordogne, France.

The fourth tweet was a little more complicated, as it presented an em-dash instead of a dash in the middle of the tweet: 63-84823—20-8712. I decided that the em-dash was most likely a way of signaling a negative value for the longitude, and tried 63.84823,-20.8712. That seemed to work, placing me in Iceland; but to be sure, I removed the negative value, and found the spot in the ocean off Sweden. The sixth tweet contained a similar em-dash, and similarly dropped me in the ocean when I removed the negative. The same thing happened with the most recent tweet, which featured a negative sign at the front of the longitude.

So here are all eight locations:

View MZD Tweets mapped in a larger map

The locations are rather diverse, although only on three out of seven continents thus far. I suspect that we’ll see more places mapped soon. MZD has been tweeting once every two weeks, so I think in another 10 days or so I’ll be adding another location to this map.

It’s certainly possible that I’m completely wrong about these numbers being spatial coordinates. And they don’t begin to explain why he is tweeting a blank, black image along with every set of numbers. But if I’m wrong, I’ll be in good company. Someone blogging at schinjislist.blogspot.com had noticed the tweets before I did and had come to the same conclusion about them being best understood in relation to a map. There is, naturally, a post on the MZD forums, on the subject as well. Update: And, it turns out, some steganographic analysis that has been done on Reddit. 10 points to Paul for finding that as well.

It’s worth looking around the locations. Zach Whalen noticed, for example, that there seem to be several loops or circles near each point. That would work well with some of MZD’s thematics. But again, allways, and allready one must be wary of apophenia.