The Incremental Sea Research Platform
51 writers and mapmakers | 5,000 miles of coastline
This project is a set of meditations on the Black Sea. It draws on dozens of pieces of mapwork and artwork: poems, stories, maps, memoirs, and novels composed by men and women shaped by the sea. It identifies the concepts that cross generations, borderlines, and genres."[H]istory has always staged its most dramatic acts upon the margin of seas and oceans; here always the plot thickens and gives promise of striking and tremendous development.” - Ellen Semple
The project grew out of the simple observation that shorelines are deceptive. They suggest a clean separation of land from water. They convey certainty of space and clarity of substance. But anyone who has ever approached the sea knows those lines merge and dissipate as soon as they are drawn. The shore is a transitional space where our sense of vulnerability, isolation, loss, and freedom grow strong. Where water meets land we feel the passage of time more acutely.
The project also grew from a search for the water. So many maps promise the sea and deliver the coast. After poring over the maps in this collection we set out to represent the sea itself. We wanted to find a way to represent it as an abundant and unpredictable space, full of movement and life. The mosaic map we built is the structure that holds the project together. We traced the features of the maps (things like currents and soundings and fish) back to the texts, and mapped the increments - the individual sentences that constitute the texts - to the surface of the sea.
You might find the Incremental Sea filled with the unfamiliar. Maybe you have never heard of Serhii Zhadan or Blaga Dimitrova. Maybe you've never looked at a 16th century nautical chart. But the project is full of patterns and references and plenty of familiar things, from lighthouses to seagulls. Maybe you want to study the connections between seascape and vulnerability. Maybe you just want to sift through a thousand beautifully-crafted sentences in search of meaning. No matter what your motivation, use this platform to prompt questions and inspire further research.
Project team: Kelly O'Neill (editor; maps curation & analysis; digital design); Olive Coles (text curation & analysis); Paul Vădan (editor; installation of physical exhibit). Special thanks to Yevhenii Monastyrskyi for his original translations of both poems by Zhadan, Paul Vădan for his original translation of the excerpt from Radu Tudoran's All Sails Up!, and Lucinda Harley for the handwritten increment cards distributed at the exhibit launch.
Rights note: All materials are drawn from publicly accessible sources. Maps have been sourced from accessible collections at Harvard Library, the Library of Congress, and the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, or are original works. Author portraits have been sourced from wikipedia pages. "Element" illustrations were created using ChatGPT 5 or DALLE-3.
The Incremental Sea Research Platform is available via CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Publication date: September 22, 2025 [version 1]
