Laura T. Smith's blog

Coming Close to Environmental Disaster

Laura T. Smith — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 05:47:27 +0000

(Image Credit: Google Earth image of ash cloud in Iceland , produced with GeoEye satellite imagery)

My very dear friend Tes is stuck in Ireland this week, grounded by the great Iceland ash cloud and hoping to get back in time for her dissertation defense. She’s been looking for a t-shirt that says, “Eyjafjallajokull 2010” for days, but evidently, no one’s selling.

Her steady stream of emails from Ireland made me think to go look for Google Earth volcanic imagery, and indeed, there are new satellite images from “GeoEye Featured Imagery” (Under “Layers,” click on “More,” then “GeoEye.”) The above picture allows us to see smoke coming out of a bright spot near the mid-left of the image and great clouds of ash floating down toward the bottom-right corner.

This search made me wonder if imagery had been updated—or high-res imagery had ever been produced—of Upper Big Branch Mine, the site of the massive West Virginia mining disaster that took 29 lives last week.

What I found was interesting. Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, WV can be seen, in its current state, in this photo.

(Image Credit: Google Earth image Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, WV)

It’s a mountaintop mine, so what you see is a mountain with its top cut away. If you have your “Global Awareness” layer turned on (as I do in the above picture), you’ll see a yellow box drawn around the mining site. These boxes appear around mountaintop mining sites throughout West Virginia and are maintained by Appalachian Mountaintop Removal, a group that has built an electronic “Memorial For the Mountains.”

You’ll see a blue square at the upper-left corner of the yellow box. If you’re in Google Earth and you click on that square, you find historical imagery of the mining area. The below image shows the same mountain in 1986.

(Image Credit: Google Earth historical image Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, WV)

The difference is startling, and the Appalachian Mountaintop Removal project's electronic memorial makes this information readily and publically available. Each "Memorial" placemark links to the previous and next mountain on the tour, so you can click through them and learn about the history of West Virginia’s natural areas and the mining industry's activity. The organization says that they will continue to archive imagery, with the goal of providing three decades of continuous historical imagery to document the area’s rapid change.

These images of Iceland and Montcoal allow us to visit the areas affected by disaster and see how disasters are being documented, whether by major corporations like GeoEye, or by local interest groups like Appalachian Mountaintop Removal.

Report from the Classroom, Part 2

Laura T. Smith — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 03:48:53 +0000

(Image credit: Google Earth map created by Smith's RHE 306)

Caroline and I completed our Food Geographies Collaborative Writing Workshop last week.

My students decided to keep their class map broad, not restricting it to Austin, to Texas, or to the United States. As a result, the geographies they trace are provocative, but also somewhat diffuse. That is, we might have gotten better results by densely mapping a limited area, but patterns emerge on our worldwide map that would not otherwise have been visible.

While many students chose to map sites in the Austin area or the United States, the above map shows the efforts of two students who worked on mapping some non-U.S. sites, including major World Food Program sites, fast food locations in developing counties, and key sugar-producing sites. More detail on these sites and others, after the jump.

I had some difficulty getting students to think about food controversies in terms of what information should go on a map. Many students wanted to map corporate headquarters of relevant companies such as Kraft, McDonalds, and Monsanto. While I think it’s actually quite helpful for students to see these companies as physical, located entities, I’m not sure that their geographical placement on the map tells us as much about food politics as, say, one students’ mapping of key sugar industry sites, or another student’s mapping of fast food restaurant locations in developing countries. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to make more of these connections about the geography of food during our closing discussion on Tuesday. I wonder if, in the future, it would be helpful to give the map a more focused theme, e.g., “How might we map hunger?” “Or how might we map nutrition?”

Here are some highlights:

Anna’s mapping of caffeine shows that many major caffeine-product companies, including Red Bull and Vivarin, are based in Europe, but have dominant markets in the United States, which she notes has a global reputation of being addicted to caffeine.

Daniel’s mapping of World Food Programs features a massive food cooperative in Uganda that is the World Food Program’s largest supplier of key commodities. His placemark explains that the cooperative produces genetically-modified maize, corn, beans, and vegetable oil, among other crops. He also placemarked a major food drop-off site in the Sudan which receives large quantities of genetically-modified foods.

Griffin’s mapping of non-U.S. McDonald’s locations shows the influence of American fast food in both major metropolitan cities and in developing areas. According to Griffin’s placemark, the McDonald’s location is Pushkin square is the largest-grossing McDonald’s in the world.

Two students, Elizabeth and Duyen, teamed up to map farms and Community-Supported Agriculture sites (CSAs) near Austin, TX (as the below map shows), while Kirsten mapped the oldest farmer's market locations in the United States.

(Image credit: Google Earth map of farms and CSAs near Austin, TX, by students in Smith's RHE 306.)

On Tuesday, we’ll finish the exercise by analyzing the map and having a conversation about what’s missing from our class map. In addition, we’ll overlay Caroline Wigginton’s class map and discuss the ways the expanded map enacts collaborative writing. We’ll also note differences in the two classes’ approach to food politics.

In conclusion, I want to add that the students seemed to really enjoy this exercise. The were eager to jump onto computers on find places to plot, latitudes, longitudes, and images on Tuesday, and on Thursday, as they transferred their data from the Placemark Data Collection Worksheet to the class spreadsheet (which they all edited simultaneously from individual computers, using Google Documents), they were eager to see their results show up on the projection screen. The exercise was dynamic and collaborative and provided a refreshing change of focus and pace for the class.

The students also seem to be interested in the prospect of composing their final “paper” as a Google Earth narrated tour, an option I’ve allowed them. I’m looking forward to receiving a number of these.

Google Earth Collaboration in Action!

Laura T. Smith — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:00:24 +0000

(Image credit: Image capture from Google Earth; data created by Laura)

Caroline and I are doing our Google Earth collaborative writing workshop this week. We put the finishing touches on the assignment a couple weeks ago. The above image provides a sample of how our students will map their controversies. (I've chosen some local Austin sites that are relevant to food politics for my sample map: the corporate headquarters of Whole Foods; Casa de Luz, a macrobiotic restaurant, community center, and preschool; Wheatsville Food Co-op; Eastside Cafe, which grows its own ingredients; and Kerbey Lane Cafe, a local 24 hour diner that offers seasonal menus based on locally-grown ingredients.)
After much discussion, we decided to take a middle road with the map’s subject matter: we wanted our students to be collaborators on determining the map’s actual content—what will appear on it—so we didn’t want the assignment to dictate the content (e.g., “Make a map of Austin grocery stores.”). But we also reconsidered having our students simply map their own research. While we still believe that mapping their semester data would be useful for visualizing and reconceptualizing the results, we were concerned that this approach might not really create new writing, and “mapping as writing” is an important way we think about this activity.

For these reasons, Caroline and I are each taking our students through a brainstorming session on Day 1 of the activity (Monday, for Caroline’s class; Tuesday, for mine). We’ll ask our students to define what places must be on our class map in order to “map our controversies.” Our brainstorming session will answer this question widely, including results that have emerged from students’ independent research and also other results. In other words, students may argue that it’s important to include the corporate headquarters of Monsanto, or the Food and Drug Administration offices, or the major corn syrup refineries in the United States. But in addition to these topic-specific sites, we’ll also ask, what else needs to be on our map to create a fuller picture of food politics? What farms? What chemical plants? What international sites? In this way, we’ll populate the map with an eye to drawing a rich picture of the sites that make up and participate in our controversies, including, but going beyond the discrete topics themselves.

From this point, students will each adopt three sites for which they’ll be responsible for placemarks. They will then fill out a “Placemark Data Collection Worksheet” for each site and will, later this week, finally enter their data into Google Spreadsheet Mapper. By the end of the week, both classes will be able to view our combined results in one big map.

Caroline and I personalized the template to make each class’s placemarks look different. My class’s placemarks will be indicated on the map by this icon:

(Image credit: Joseph Darnell)

By distinguishing between the two class’s placemarks, we’ll be able to do some cross-class comparison. We’ll ask, How do the classes’ maps compare? Are there marked differences in the two sets of placemarks? What does this suggest about how each class community is thinking and talking about food controversies?

Caroline and I outlined these main goals for the workshop goals:

As our students have spent the bulk of their time on written/verbal rhetoric, we want to introduce the students to visual rhetoric in a way that integrates with and builds upon their other coursework.
As much writing outside of the university involves collaboration, we want students to experience how writing and revision operate when they occur within a community and to rethink authorship within such a writing environment.
As coursework can often feel disconnected from reality, we want students to associate their controversies with particular images and locations and thereby (re)experience their writing as co-extensive with their lives as citizens and individuals.

We should be able to let you know how it turns out by next Monday.

Taco Geography

Laura T. Smith — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 01:03:21 +0000

The folks over at Good Blog have published early results from a California College of the Arts assignment that took place in a landscape architecture class. Like a lot of classes here at UT, this class was asked to analyze the “tacoshed” for a single taco bought in San Francisco’s Mission District, from Juan’s Taco Truck. “Tacoshed” refers to the “geographical boundaries of a taco’s origins.”

Because the project was a conducted by landscape architecture as well as art and design students, the presentation of results was a crucial part of the analysis, and in this case, the researchers collaboratively constructed the above map, visually charting the provenance a single taco.

The map was created as each student researched the origins of a single ingredient in the total taco, from beans to cheese to avocado to the aluminum foil wrapping. Students found that a number of ingredients came from surprisingly close by, while others made long, complex journeys with multiple production stops. Aluminum foil and adobo seasoning proved to have the longest and most complex travel routes.

The author, Twilight Greenaway, reports that, in all, the ingredients of the single taco journeyed a sum total of 64,000 miles, “or just over two and a half times the circumference of the earth.”

According to the taco vendor, every component was purchased at Costco or Restaurant Depot, with an eye to price.

The students’ impressive map indexes a range of data through a few different graphic systems. The map indicates origin points, such as farms, by grey squares, and intermediary production sites, such as plants and corporate offices, by red squares. Travel routes are also marked: solid red lines indicate food paths, dashed lines indicate aluminum foil’s path, and dotted lines represent the path of fuel, such as petroleum.

A second information stream is contained below the map, as each taco component is listed in the order of distance travelled. Together, graphic and numerical indicators show the exact mileage through color-coded mileage bars: salt and cheese came an easy 31 and 65 miles, respectively, while aluminum foil travelled an astounding 19,000 miles.

The point of the project, however, was not simply to bemoan the globalization of food or advocate for buying local. Rather, the class took a “close look at the embodied energy in each ingredient,” comparing the energy expenditure of local greenhouse tomatoes with tomatoes “shipped from the Southern Hemisphere, where they’d been grown in summer weather.” Similarly, they examined the politics of aluminum foil, which had travelled the farthest from home--a mine in New Zealand--but could be recycled and could continue on its epic journey in yet another form.

The full results will be published in a book, but a summary of the study is forthcoming in Meatpaper Magazine.

Many Ways to Map: The David Rumsey Map Collection Database

Laura T. Smith — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:08:22 +0000

(Image Credit: David Rumsey Map Collection)

Frances A. Henshaw, a student at the Middlebury Female Academy, created geographical diagrams like the one above to accompany her hand-drawn maps in her Book of Penmanship Executed at the Middlebury Female Academy April 29, 1828. According to the David Rumsey Map Collection Database, Henshaw’s Book of Penmanship went far beyond penmanship, including not only maps of 19 U.S. States with accompanying original diagrams (like the above), but also astronomical maps, charts of Coperican and Ptolemaic celestial systems, as well as maps of other prominent cartographic features such as equator, meridian, polar circles, latitude and longitude. Henshaw’s geographical diagrams seem to serve to illustrate or amplify the geographical data conveyed through her maps: reading in a diamond pattern (from the left and right upper diagonals, inward, then from the right and left lower diagonals, outward), the diagram reads:

Ohio. The number of old forts in Kentucky county are the admiration of the curious and a matter of Speculation. Columbia is the seat of government… The Ohio river…… nearly half surrounds the state. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

According to the Rumsey Collection, students commonly drew maps as part of their geography lessons, but Henshaw’s is a rare, extant example of this accompanying compositional and artistic activity. Interestingly, the figures that resemble ellipses and x’s in the diagram suggest the running stitches and cross-stitches native to a needlework sampler; in this way, the geographical diagram (included in a book of penmanship) seems to evoke the needlework samplers also frequently used to teach letters, spelling, and reading in early American schools.

Henshaw’s diagrams, rare finds, are among the 20,000 cartographic artifacts collected, preserved, and made readily, digitally available through the David Rumsey Map Collection Database, another one of the exceptional image archives we’d like to draw attention to in preparation for our upcoming workshop on “Best Practices for Digital Images,” coming up this Friday, March 26th at 1 pm. The full Rumsey Collection, including all non-digitized items, includes over 150,000 items. The Collection has particularly strong holdings in rare 18^th and 19^th century maps of North and South America, but it has vast resources in many other areas as well. While the Collection began 25 years ago, digitization began in 1996. Information about the Collections’ newest acquisitions and features is available on the regularly updated blog.

One of the strongest features of the David Rumsey Map Collection Database is the range of ways it allows viewers to view and download maps. All digitized resources are available for download in six to eight sizes, from small thumbnails to extra large, high-resolution files up to 12288 pixels. But the Rumsey Collection is perhaps especially astute in the methods it offers for viewing or browsing the Collection: the primary way to view the Collection is through the robust LUNA browser. (LUNA Imaging is also one of Rumsey’s projects.) The LUNA browser gives the researcher tremendous control of the browsing and searching experience, allowing her to select the size (small, medium, large) and number (50, 100, 250) of thumbnails that will be tiled on a page for browsing. Basic searches are allowed by resource type, map area, map creator, and map date, and advanced search functionality is also available. The Collection has also partnered with Google, Second Life, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to make Rumsey Historical Maps viewable in 3-D through Google Maps, Google Earth, and GIS maps.

(Image Credit: David Rumsey Map Collection)

Lastly, the maps are viewable through a “Collections Ticker” that presents an ongoing horizontal stream of randomized map thumbnails. The ticker is a free-standing, thin horizontal bar that launches separately from the Map Collection and can stay on your screen while you work in other applications. It takes roughly eight hours for the entire Rumsey Database to scroll across the ticker.

Google Earth Pedagogies: Making the Most of Map Databases

Laura T. Smith — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:10:47 +0000

(Image source: Library of Congress Map Collections)

The above map, created by George Washington in 1766, depicts “A plan of my farm on Little Huntg. Creek & Potomk.” This map, which is publicly viewable at the Library of Congress Map Collections and downloadable as a high-resolution JPEG2000 file, is included in the Collections’ “Cultural Landscapes” section, which highlights the ongoing cultural construction of United States and World landscapes through the ways individuals, communities, and nations modify land. This subsection of the online Collection places an array of cartographic materials into conversation: a set of local maps authored by George Washington, a series of maps of Liberia created by the American Colonization Society, and a store of historical U.S. atlases.

One of the distinguishing features of The Library of Congress’s Map Collection is that it is part database, part exhibit. The online Collection boasts sophisticated cataloguing and imaging standards, allowing users to zoom in on maps, examine details, download high-resolution image files, and refer to helpful notes about the map’s physical features and provenance, including scale, media, size, accompanying materials, and source. The site also offers helpful advice about copyright, noting that materials in the collection are generally not copyrighted materials; the maps “were either published prior to 1922, produced by the United States government, or both.” The site clearly aims to make the Library’s cartographic collections freely available and digitally accessible and to encourage users to download and use these materials for study, education, research, and enjoyment. The site intersects at many points with the Library’s larger “American Memory” project, which has digitized over five million items from the Library’s Collections since 1996.

I am interested in the possibilities of a maps database such as the Library of Congress Map Collections partly because of the prospect of using historical maps within Google Earth, and partly because our Visual Rhetoric workgroup is preparing to host an upcoming workshop, “Best Practices for Digital Images” on Friday March 26^th at 1 pm. One component of the workshop will be an introduction to the many rich image databases that are available on the web. To that end, some of our posts over the next few weeks will serve to review and evaluate some of these databases.

Three significant, online map databases are The Library of Congress Map Collections, the Perry-Castanada Map Collection at the University of Texas Libraries, and the David Rumsey Map Collection.

These collections all have large holdings that are available to the public and offer downloadable images, though only the Library of Congress and the David Rumsey Collection offer consistently high-resolution downloads. (The Perry-Castanada Map Collection seems to prioritize keeping files to a manageable size for its users; the website claims that most of its images, usually JPEGS or PDFs, are kept to size standards of 200K to 300K.) These three collections, run by a federal organization, a public university, and a private company, respectively, vary widely in terms of cataloguing and indexing practices, image quality, image context, and general online experience.

My aim today will be to offer a very brief overview of the first two image collections, Library of Congress Map Collections and the Perry-Castanada Map Collection. (I'll discuss the Rumsey Collection in a later post.) I will give an expanded analysis of the features and utility of Library of Congress’s Collection for pedagogical applications.

The Library of Congress Map Collections, the online arm of the Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division, represents a small fraction of the holdings of the Map Division’s collection, which includes more than 4.5 million items. The Library of Congress Map Collections began as a massive digitizing project in 1995. The Library does not estimate how many maps are online, but notes that new materials are digitized and added continually.

The Perry-Castanada Map Collection includes more than 250,000 maps, 11,000 of which are available for online viewing. (In addition, maps from the Perry-Castanada Map Collection can also be physically checked out by students, faculty, or the general public for a two-week borrowing period.) As I noted above, the Perry-Castanada Collection does not prioritize providing high-resolution images or downloads of their materials; their files, generally formatted as JPEGs, GIFs, or PDFs, are considerably smaller than those of the other two sites. The Perry-Castanada Collection does offer categorized links to hundreds of other map collections though, including the Library of Congress and The Rumsey Collection, as well as other research collections and independent web sites.

While each digitized map is indexed in the Library’s general catalogue, the Maps Collection does not include the catalogue information or a link to the catalogue entries, so, in fact, the amount of information about the map available with the image is minimal, usually including the title of the map or atlas in which it was printed, its publication date, and sometimes the organization that published or produced it. The user has to separately look up the map in the online catalogue to obtain full information. The full catalogue entries offer additional information such as the map’s author, but the general purpose catalogue does not give the depth of information one might expect from a special collections catalogue entry, including detailed notes about medium, size, inscriptions, accompany materials, or provenance.

As I noted earlier, the Library of Congress Map Collection works like a database and an online exhibit at once. The materials are indexed via a number of different methods: the whole collections is divided into seven major thematic categories, which allow users topical entry into the cartographic resources. Those categories include

“Cities and Towns” (which includes a number of panoramic maps, a cartographic style popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries)
“Conservation and Environment” (including the subcollection, “Mapping the National Parks”)
“Discovery and Exploration”
“Cultural Landscapes”
“Military Battles and Campaigns” (including American Revolution and Civil War maps)
“Transportation and Communication” (including a collection of Railroad Maps)
“General Maps”

Nearly every collection includes a “Special Presentation,” an online exhibition with text and images that invites users to delve into some selected resources within the collection, rather than using the site by entering specific search terms. This feature allows users to have a curated, museum experience, clearly serving not only the Library’s goal of making documents available to the public, but also its educational goals.

While users can browse within these thematic categories, which include their own Collection Guides, users can also search by keyword, or browse indexes by geographic location, subject, map creator, or map title.

Indeed, as the above list of browse-able indexes suggests, the site relies heavily on browsing to make its resources available to users. For example, as the visitor enters the Railroad Maps Collection, she finds only a very cursory introduction to the collection—a total of five lines of text—on its home page, and this Collection happens to include no curated “Special Presentation” to introduce the user to the Collection’s material, so searching or browsing become her best methods of accessing information. Fortunately, the Geographic Location Index offers a robust, visual, clickable map icons to help users locate materials by country (Canada, United States, Mexico, and West Indies), U.S. region, and U.S. state.

In this way, the Library of Congress Map Collections site combines sophisticated cataloguing methods with an inviting, browse-able online environment. The icons that accompany the seven thematic categories perhaps best express this mission of the site: each is a collage of multiple materials from the category, with numbers identifying the source of each element of the collage, which are clickable:

(Image source: Library of Congress Map Collections)

The Cultural Landscapes icon, for example, pairs a detail from the 1766 Washington map (pictured in full at top) with a detail from an 1867 American Colonization Society map, “St. Pauls River, Liberia at its mouth.” The clickable collage, which links to each element's catalogue page, represents the site’s values: user-based discovery (facilitated by either browsing or searching), curated experience, thematic intersections, accessibility, and high-quality image and cataloguing standards. By clicking on the category icon, the user not only enters the "Cultural Landscapes" section, but is confronted by provocatively juxtaposed visuals accompanied by links to each detailed source page.

Not surprisingly, the site offers extensive materials for teachers, including classroom ideas, lesson plans, and primary source sets (groups of images related to a historical period or theme) through its “Collection Connections” section.

The Collection’s choice of somewhat unusual file formats for images is, perhaps, an unfortunate extension of the value placed, at once, on accessibility and high quality that I appreciate throughout most of the site. Rather than offering more common image file formats such as TIFFs GIFS, or JPEGS, the Library has chosen to compress their large documents as JPEG2000 and MrSID files to preserve detail and enable high-resolution downloads. Both of these formats require plug-ins, and while the site offers links to free versions, I would have liked to have available a low-resolution option (a GIF or JPEG) that required no software plug-in.

Google Earth Pedagogies: Building My Assignment

Laura T. Smith — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:06:46 +0000

(Image Credit: Aijaz Rahi from guardian.co.uk)

As I’ve been considering assignments for my students’ Google Earth “Food Geographies” exercise, I had expected to assign a classwide map topic—such as “Map Austin CSAs,” “Map Austin grocery stores,” or “Map a meal.”

Now that I’ve previewed a number of Google Maps assignments, gotten some ideas about the pedagogical possibilities of Google Earth, and—most importantly—read my students’ first papers, I’m angling more toward letting their maps be self-driven. Indeed, I was struck by the food geographies already implicit in my students’ arguments.

My students’ papers discussed a range of food-related topics (these will be familiar to everyone else teaching RHE 306), including the ethics, health, and possible dangers of genetically-modified foods, food-labeling policies (for genetically-modified foods as well as conventional foods), high fructose corn syrup, farm subsidies, obesity, fast food, slow food, organics, food processing, dietary variety, and corn politics.

One student noted the relative acceptance of genetically-modified foods in the United States, citing tougher standards and strict labeling policies in Australia, India, Britain, and the European Union, noting the protests against the genetically-modified eggplant (pictured above and below) that have taken place in India in recent weeks, staged by environomental organization such as Greenpeace, as well as consumer groups and the public at large. Another student discussed differing worldwide farm subsidy policies, while another compared the rhetoric of the organic food movements in Britain and the United States. Another student researched the effects of U.S. corn politics, including subsidies and genetic modification, on Mexico’s corn growing and consumption. I found few papers where food hadn’t already taken on spatial and global meanings.

Since I only have two class periods to spend, and because I expect the students’ food geographies to produce fruitful intersections, I’m now planning to ask them to create their own set of three placemarks on a class map, rather than creating individual maps. An alternate strategy might be to put students into map groups, so that all students who are researching genetic modification, for example, are creating a common map.

There are two primary ways to create placemarkers in Google Earth—either one can create these manually or one can use a standardization template such as Spreadsheet Mapper. While manual placemarks are quick and intuitive and students can quickly create them and add text, links, and images, Spreadsheet Mapper allows for branded placemarks which have set fields (text, image, link) and a standard look (colors, fonts, layout). The standardization of Spreadsheet Mapper is appealing for creating a common, class map or group maps.

I’m currently planning to introduce students to Google Earth by having them “draft” their placemarks in manual mode, during class. I think that the ease and immediacy of the manual mode will allow students to invent, get creative, and draw associations that the less intuitive Spreadsheet Mapper might stifle. The information for the placemarks will come from and connect to their semester-long research topics. Then, as a second draft, I’ll ask students to contribute their placemarks and placemark content into Spreadsheet Mapper to create one standardized, common map.

I’m especially interested in requiring standard fields, including text, a link, and an image. Adding images like the ones presented here provide a further analytical framework as students can see how eggplant politics are hitting the streets in India, how interest groups are representing or organizing their causes, and how the faces of food politics, such as the organic movement, frame and market themselves in different parts of the world.

(Image Credit: tcenews.com)

Here, images restore specificity, detail, and humanity to topics, crucial aspects that can paradoxically get lost in a semester-long research process, paired with the course’s demand for analytical writing. I'm hoping that these mapping exercises will reinvigorate the students' projects with creative energy and place human faces on the issues.

Finally, I've recently decided to further expand the project by allowing students the option of writing their final paper as a Google Earth animated tour. I still have to figure out how this option will work, but I like the idea of extending our work with Google Earth into a larger project, and a significant product.

Google Earth Pedagogies: Beyond “That’s So Cool”

Laura T. Smith — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:54:43 +0000

(Image credit: Image capture of the Parthenon in Athens, Greece from Google Earth)

A fellow graduate student recently mentioned to me that his rhetoric professor had used Google Maps to show classical Athens to the class. He told me, “I kept thinking how much cooler it would have been if we were looking at it in Google Earth, walking around down there in street view.”

It’s true. As shown above, a street view of the Acropolis is, indeed, pretty cool. There is a simple and undeniable “wow” factor about flying to and viewing sites in Google Earth. But it’s been my contention throughout these blogs that the use of the Google Earth technology can go beyond the “that’s so cool” factor and can actually enhance and expand composition pedagogies. Former DWRLer Jim Brown (now of Wayne State University) makes this point, too, as he discusses possible evaluation strategies for Google Maps assignments. Brown writes, “These maps are writing. They are not just some ‘cool’ thing that will then require a ‘real’ writing assignment. This assignment should open up important discussions about how cartography is a form of writing and about how ‘the map is not the territory.’ Students are creating something here, not merely reflecting an existing reality” (Brown, “Mapping Home”).

Brown’s assignment, like most of the assignments I’ve found so far, asks students to work in Google Maps, not Google Earth. But the writing component is applicable. The activity he designed, called “Mapping Home,” asks students to map key sites in their daily lives, using the map to elucidate the “borders” that they negotiate or cross regularly. The link above includes a sample map created by Brown. Using the “My Maps” function in Google Maps, each of Brown’s students created a individual map with an introduction and placemarks with text and embedded links, images, or video.

To get the most out of the assignment and to aid evaluation, Brown encourages instructors to set their expectations about students’ maps:

How many placemarks should students create?
What components should placemarks include?
How much text should placemarks include?
What components, if any, besides placemarks, should maps include? (Should they include border lines, connecting lines, or other vectors, for example?)
Should the map include an introduction? What should the introduction accomplish?
Is an accompanying reflective essay required, or should the map itself (or an in-class discussion) accomplish the task of reflection?

Other assignments using Google Maps technology include Jeremy Dean’s “Map Three Readings,” which asks students to use a map to “draw a physical and thematic connection” between multiple readings by placing authors or characters on a map, and Eileen McGinnis’ “Mapping Galapagos,” which asks students to map landmarks and events in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Galapagos. McGinnis frames the map as a thinking process, not a product, at least at the outset: “Keep in mind that your map will function initially as a tool for discovering something unexpected about the novel rather than for charting the Known World.”

These assignments demonstrate well how writing within maps can aid students’ invention process, prompt students to make visual, spatial, and physical connections within and across texts, and can, themselves, constitute an argument (thereby denaturalizing mapping as an authorless or objective rendering of space).

Most of these assignments were created before the release of Google Earth, however, so they might be adjusted or reformulated to more fully take advantage of Google Earth’s distinct capacities, such as its capacity to show non-static data, to depict historical change, to show beautifully-rendered, 3D buildings, to travel from site to site via a user-generated animated tour, to offer various annotation options via clickable layers, and to move quickly between macro and micro views of the same landscape. While some of these features are available in Google Maps, Google Earth’s animation feature allows users to dramatize these functions, heightening their effect.

Google Earth’s homepage includes a Gallery of selected tours and animations that demonstrate the technology’s advanced functions. These animations give a sense of the informational and analytical uses of features particular to Google Earth, such as 3D buildings, historical timelines, and the ability to travel. The Gallery includes tours of major world cathedrals, castles, libraries, and universities, as well as an animation of major international flight routes. Each file must be opened within Google Earth, so users must download the software, which is free and available on the same site, to view the demonstrations. It's also important to note that users must find in Google Earth's left-hand sidebar an icon that looks like a movie camera. Clicking this icon will "run" the file.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, the DWRL’s Geo-Everything Group has been putting together resources to familiarize instructors with Google Earth and help them integrate it into the writing classroom. Their recent Google Earth Workshop provided a practical introduction for using Google Earth in the classroom, including tips for making basic and customized placemarks and using Google’s data template, Spreadsheet Mapper, for creating collaborative maps with “branded,” standardized placemarks. I recommend taking a look at their Google Earth Workshop handout for practical guidance to getting started in Google Earth.

Google Earth Pedagogies: A Survey of Pedagogical Applications

Laura T. Smith — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:33:24 +0000

(Image Credit: Google LitTrips)

As I’ve been previewing Google Earth educational applications on the web, I’ve noticed that while many disciplines (science, geography, history) are using Google Earth to engage students and invite them to create within the software, applications for the English classroom (at least those that are featured and discussed on the web) overwhelmingly take the form of teacher-made presentations. I imagine that this tendency speaks to an ongoing conservatism about the design of writing assignments, a desire to retain the five-page paper as the product of the literature and writing classroom.

In a video presentation that I’ll discuss later in this post, Sean McCarthy, a graduate student at the University of Texas, admits that there may, in fact, be an “amateurism” that attends writing in the Google Maps environment, but suggests that perhaps there are some benefits to this amateurism. This quality, he suggests, may open up a level of analytical adventuresomeness that the more formal structure of the essay quashes.

I’m interested in this suggestion, but before I explore it further, I want to address some more common uses of Google Maps and Google Earth technologies in the literature and writing classroom. I’ve noticed that the use of these technologies takes three main forms: Mapping as a Presentation Tool, Mapping as an Analytical Tool, and Mapping as a Writing Tool. Of course, these uses overlap, but the discrete categories generally reflect the way the software is actually being used in the classroom.

Mapping as a Presentation Tool

As I mentioned above, presentations are overwhelmingly the primary, much-evidenced use of Google Maps and Earth technologies in the literature classroom. The Google for Educators site offers a collection of Google LitTrips as their recommended idea for using Google Earth in the English classroom. The LitTrips include maps of The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. In the latter case, the LitTrip was created by German literature students at Notre Dame, but this student-created example is the exception.

The Google Earth Education Community , run by David Herring, a long-time teacher at University High School in Tucson, Arizona, similarly focuses on presentations, providing instructions for teachers to build presentations and a space for users to share their Google Earth presentations. The Google Earth presentations on Herring’s site include “The Life and Works of Jane Austen,” “Locations in Shakespeare’s Plays,” as well as maps for William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways and River Horse, and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. While these presentations offer useful geospatial conceptualizations of literary works, they do not take advantage of the technology’s capacities for encouraging students to think and write in new and networked mediums.

Mapping as an Analytical Tool

In the aforementioned video presentation on Google Map pedagogies, University of Texas graduate student Sean McCarthy explains uses of Google Maps that extend far beyond getting directions. McCarthy shows how students can use the maps' built-in analytical tools such as the terrain map, satellite map, and street view, as well as the optional “overlays,” including articles from Wikipedia, photos from Panoramio, and video from YouTube to analyze geographical and social spaces and their online construction.

He suggests that students might be divided into groups to examine a city, its neighborhoods, its layout, its public transportation and other services, its parks and greenspace, and its history using such user-generated data.

He also notes that such an examination requires students to examine the rhetorical construction of Google Maps itself. Which areas show street views? Which areas include large amounts of user-generated content, such as links to Wikipedia articles and YouTube clips?

Mapping as a Writing Tool

While the above example engages students directly with maps, it stops just short of asking students to actually create compositions in dialogue with these technologies.

McCarthy has a number of suggestions for how to get students writing in Google Maps. Here are just a few:

McCarthy features an assignment designed by University of Texas graduate student Amena Moinfar, in which students map the national origin of each player on the French soccer team, Les Bleus, to help them conceptualize the reach of French colonialism and the ongoing effects of the French-Algerian War.
McCarthy features a student-created map of the history of rugby that shows the sport’s presence overwhelmingly in the southern hemisphere. The student who created this map discovered through this process the connection between rugby and colonialism.
McCarthy suggests asking students to create a map alongside a formal, five-page paper, as the map allows for reflection and for a different mode of presenting research and representating connections.
McCarthy features a student map, created in real time during the uprisings in Tibet and elsewhere in protest of the Beijing Olympics. McCarthy notes that because the student created the map in the networked space of Google Maps, linked it to his blog, and kept updating it, the map turned into a real public commentary on the protests, which in fact got thousands of hits.

As is evident in the last assignment described above, composing in Google Maps places students’ writing into a socially networked environment. McCarthy joins many composition scholars, including Sharon Crowley and Michael Stancliff, when he argues that placing students’ writing into contexts that extend beyond the classroom enriches the compositional activity and connects students to audiences, which raises the stakes of the writing activity. He further argues that creating and sharing content is, indeed, the way students are increasingly accustomed to writing: according to McCarthy, 60% of all 19-year-olds publish on the web every day through social media outlets such as Facebook.

While composition and literature instructors may prefer the familiar, formal, linear structure of the traditional essay, McCarthy's findings suggest that the "amatuerish" writing student sometimes produce when composing in digital mediums in fact bespeaks the quality and complexity of their research and analytical connections.

There are more Google Maps- and Google Earth-related assignments indexed in the DWRL’s database of technology-based lesson plans. If you plug “Google Maps” into the site’s search bar, you’ll easily turn them up.

Google Earth Pedagogies: From Haiti to RHE 306

Laura T. Smith — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:41:30 +0000

Image Credit: Google Lat Long Blog

If were you watching the news in mid-January, you likely saw images like those above flashing repeatedly across your television or computer screen. Unlike the photojournalistic, street-level portraits that tend to document disasters, these aerial shots, produced through a collaboration between Google Earth and GeoEye (a satellite imaging company), have been prominent in the visual coverage of the earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12, 2010. The above images show pre- and post-quake views of the Presidential Palace (top left; top right) and downtown Port au Prince (bottom left; bottom right), and were created using the timeline tool in Google Earth.

I’ve been interested in the prominent role that mapping and satellite-produced imagery has played in the coverage and documentation of the Haiti earthquake, partly for its own sake, and partly because I’m planning a Google Earth-based collaborative writing activity for my Rhetoric and Writing class this spring.

In the earthquake coverage, the intimate, affect-laden portrait—framed by the human eye, scaled to the human story—has remained prominent, of course, but has been augmented by this second visual approach, which has, itself, received significant news coverage. These visuals do not function the same way photojournalistic visuals function; they do not focus on the human situation; they do not construct an explicitly emotional appeal.

These sophisticated, accurate maps of damage have clearly aided rescue and relief efforts. Yet I’ve been wondering about the analytical impulses behind mapping and its effects—especially given the debates during the past few weeks about Haiti’s leadership, its autonomy, about who’s in control of relief efforts.

The history of mapping is entangled with the history of imperial expansion, shot through with impulses toward geographical control. In what ways do these contemporary mapping technologies address or confront the imperial history of map-making? While much of the mapping of Haiti has been accomplished through satellite imaging, Haiti has also been mapped collaboratively, by countless individuals with diverse motivations. (Google’s Haiti Map Maker project encourages such collaborative, local mapping.) Similarly, Wikipedia’s “Haiti” page is currently ranked in 1885th place among the most-edited pages in the last 30 days, a number that, while seemingly high, in fact indicates an extraordinarily high volume of recent edits. So, what effect does crowd-sourcing have on the implications of mapping? Is crowd-sourced mapping anti-imperialist mapping?

As I noted earlier, I’ve been considering all these questions about mapping and its implications because I’m in the process of planning a Google Earth-based collaborative writing activity with Geo-Everything’s Caroline Wigginton. We’ll be using Google Earth technologies to explore issues raised by Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. The activity, which will involve both of our RHE 306 classes, will take place in early April. In preparation for this collaboration, I’ll be using this blog throughout the spring semester to discuss Google Earth, its applications for the literature, rhetoric, and composition classroom, and, in particular, the potential it creates for collaborative writing.

As I’ve begun to think through the possibilities, I’ve come up with a few initial questions, which I’ll address (and likely add to) in the coming weeks:

For the purpose of the writing classroom, what are differences between Google Earth and Google Maps?
What are their different critical capacities? How do they ask students to conceptualize information differently?
What are their different collaborative capabilities? Is Google Earth inherently more collaborative? How can this capacity be used in the writing classroom?
How might some of the conceptual and technological features of Google Earth (the “fly to” function, the moveable timeline, the placing of local sites in the context of a globe) enable writing and thinking exercises that are different than those possible in Google Maps?