viz.

(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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.