My ideal session would be one in which participants discuss their experiences with GIS and literature projects. My contribution would be the presentation of a current project which uses Google maps to mark locations and routes of characters in James Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Specific topics the session might explore would be how best to present the relationship between original texts and the visualization of geographic spaces, how best to represent patterns between texts while also thoroughly treating each individual text, the potentials and limitations of data migration when using Google maps for such projects, and the benefits and drawbacks of open collaboration on web-based projects.
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#1 by Jasmine Mulliken on April 12, 2011 - 6:20 pm
Wow, Rebecca. Thanks so much for the link. I haven’t seen that before. I notice they have a map for Portrait. I’m glad there’s not one for Dubliners yet. I’ll have to get that loaded up ASAP!
#2 by Rebecca Davis on April 12, 2011 - 4:46 pm
Are you familiar with Google Lit trips? www.googlelittrips.org/
#3 by Jasmine Mulliken on March 29, 2011 - 2:43 am
Thanks for the comment, Ben. Your project sounds like a lot of fun and very fascinating! I actually don’t have any experience with the inner workings of GIS systems either, only the user interfaces and tools that allow non-experts like myself to make some purposeful maps. Like you, I hope to learn more from the diverse perspectives at Camp 🙂
#4 by Ben Brumfield on March 29, 2011 - 2:01 am
I’d love to attend/participate in a session like this. I’ve got no GIS experience at all, but the kinds of data encoding/visualization you describe really resonates with a project I’ve been involved in. We’ve got old naturalists’ field notebooks–essentially a narrative with records of species sightings as the narrator moves in place and time–and are trying to extract GIS-ready maps of each species. The parallels to the movement of literary characters seems to my naive eyes to be quite close.
I doubt that I could contribute much as I’m a complete GIS new-comer, but I hope there’s enough interest for this session to make.