Franco Moretti, founder of the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel, in his more recent works has enriched contemporary literary criticism by importing methodologies from the social sciences, perhaps the best known being data mining novels of place to create maps (“literary geographies”) of a single location – e.g. the Paris of Balzac (1998) – to expose the unanalyzed cultural assumptions and mental maps of individual authors, cultures, and eras. Modern Egyptian literature, with its tradition of realistic novels, especially novels of place (e.g. Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy (1957) and Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building (2004)), is fertile soil for such an analysis. The proposed individual paper is an expansion upon a (completed) term paper for a graduate literature course that applied Moretti’s heuristic methodology to one Egyptian novel of place, Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley (1947), as a pilot test of the methodology’s usefulness to a new topos (Cairo) and era (World War II). Initial analysis involved creating six tables from spreadsheet sorting of the raw data – all unique location names in the novel (106) – by different criteria: frequency of the location’s mention, its larger geographic classification, the characters associated with the location, and its novelistic context(s). Based on these, larger social themes are then investigated and mapped at various geographic levels: the international level (Egypt versus the world beyond), national level (Cairo versus the rest of Egypt), and urban level (areas within Cairo). Themes investigated include the binary geographic and social division of poorer medieval Cairo and the (then) upscale khedival ”modern” downtown, especially as related to a central character, Hamida; internal migration from old to more modern Cairo neighborhoods; and comparisons of the geographic worlds and trajectories of the novel’s characters by various social variables: gender, ethnicity (Arab versus non-Arab), and class (marginal, working, middle, and upper). At the most focused level, the Alley itself, themes explored include larger trends in the relations between home and work locales, patterns of visitation/relationships within the Alley, and finally, a test of the hypothesis that leaving the Alley (i.e. medieval Cairo) is a mark of “success”, as many characters assume. Finally, one of the unique advantages of studying literature in situ is immediate access physically to places mentioned. The presenter would, whenever appropriate, include photographs from personal visits to the (very real) places mentioned in the novel to allow session attendees to appreciate the novel’s pivotal locations in more than just name.