viz. - Mapping

Interactive Google Map: Austin Graffiti

Laura Thain — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 04:37:31 +0000

Find below our ongoing graffiti mapping project for the city of Austin. Feel free ot contribute to this map--we ask that you take the following simple steps:

1) Place a marker as close as you can to where the graffiti currently exists or has existed.

2) Write a brief description of the graffiti.

3) Photograph the graffiti and upload it with your description. You can do this in rich-text mode.

Enjoy this growing archive of Austin graffiti!

View Interactive Austin Graffiti Map in a larger map

"That the science of cartography is limited": mapping contemporary literature

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 18:03:34 +0000

View field list: contemporary lit of place & environment in a larger map

Oh hi, viz. readers. I’m Jenn Shapland, a new contributor to the blog. I thought I'd introduce myself by showing you a Google map I made this summer.

It’s a visualization of my field exam reading list. For the last year, I’ve been compiling a list of fiction and nonfiction titles on Contemporary Literature of Place and Environment. My process for developing the list was pretty haphazard at first—I asked just about everyone I knew for suggestions, I Googled like a madwoman, I stood for hours in front of my own bookshelves and BookPeople's, making stacks of possible titles. I started to shelve the books around my house according to geographic region. But, for obvious reasons, it wasn’t long before I realized that I needed a way to see the list in front of me without tripping over it.

To get things a little more organized, I began making maps. Since I started out imagining the list geographically, and since I already had a world map tacked on the wall at home (due to the measliness of my art collection), I grabbed some pins and started labeling. But several authors proved difficult to, uh, pin down. Take, for instance, Jack Kerouac. He’s a pretty important postwar writer of place, but where does he go? He trekked all over the country in his fiction. (As you can see, I ended up stranding him in the Pacific Ocean for the time being. Later on, due to the precision Google mapping requires, I placed him in Washington, atop Desolation Peak.)

Personal photo.

Another challenge of mapping fiction authors? Their penchant for creating fictional towns, cities, or even worlds. Does Colson Whitehead’s Intuitionist take place in New York, even if the city is never named as such? Is it safe to assume that Carson McCullers was writing about a town geographically equivalent to her own home? For these writers, I made my best guess at where their fiction was located. But this wasn’t entirely satisfying. The longer I mapped—and especially as I began to build the map online using Google Maps—the more limited and limiting cartography proved to be.

Place writing fascinates me for this reason. It requires the reader and the writer to move between the external world of their surroundings and the imagined world(s) of their fiction. It makes the conceptual move of the reading process tangible. More on that in my later posts, I’m sure.

As useful as the Google Map was for visually taking in the scope and range of authors on my list, I eventually concluded that topography offered a much better schema for organizing place writing. Literary topography is not exactly a well-known concept—yet—but I aim to make it one. Topography refers to the physical terrain of a given place: its three-dimensional landforms, altitude, and the physical details it encompasses. Topography indicates not only the “natural” elements of a place, but also takes into account the man-made features that exist there. For that reason, even when I enabled the “terrain" feature on Google Maps, I wasn’t seeing what I wanted.

Unlike geographical region, which is often based on old narratives, like the frontier, that no longer apply or tell the whole story; or, environment, which calls for a distinction between what is “natural” and what is “built”; or bioregion, which refers primarily to the natural features present in a given place prior to human interventions and impacts, topography allows a consideration of place as it is, and as people interact with it and experience it. It takes into account the immediate, physical surroundings of a given place. My maps were great, but they didn't give me this kind of depth or nuance.

So, the next step in the process of visualizing my list of place literature is to find a way to capture, to some extent, the aspects of immediate experience. Perhaps photography is the way to go? Or should I build miniature, scale models of these literary terrains? I’m certainly open to suggestions.

How USA Really Voted on November 6

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 15:10:56 +0000

Image Credit: IDV Solutions

What a wonderful map! This IS the popular vote on November 6, 2012. John Nelson gave us this map, and we thank him for it. It's called a "pointillist map:" one blue dot for every 100 votes for President Obama, randomly distributed in the county in which the votes were cast. One red dot for every 100 votes for Mr. Romney. You've heard of purple states? Well here's our purple country. Click the link on the image credit to find a large and hi-def version of this map. Then meet me back here, won't you?

I'll be candid. There's an irrational part of me that wants the result of an election to match how much blue or red there is on the map. I know that's not how it works. This time, the state-level electoral college map came out pretty evenly red and blue. But take a look at the county-level map:

Image Credit: Wikipedia

As usual, it looks like a sea of red with a few islands of blue, and yet, as we all know, President Obama was elected for four more years. I realize that it's a question of population density not geographical space, but now, at long last and thanks to Mr. Nelson, I can see that.

Mr. Nelson tells us he was inspired to make this kind of map by his advisor, a Professor Kirk Goldsberry. Here's a pointillist map of the 2012 presidential election Professor Goldsberry did of the Dallas Fort Worth Area:

Image Credit: Kirk Goldsberry/KK Outlet

The top map shows red and blue dots for Mr. Romney and President Obama respectively. The bottom map shows voters by ethnicity. (Can you guess? Try and then click the link to find out.) What a revelation! Of course, pointillist maps are only one of the new mapping techniques to show election data, but they are a powerful one. Looking at John Nelson's map I find myself thinking: so this is who we are.

Image Credit: IDV Solutions

One thing we seem to be is country and city. Do you notice how there is a ring of red around the purple-blue cities? That seems to hold true around the nation.

Google Maps Assignment by Sean McCarthy

Lisa Gulesserian — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:49:17 +0000

Image Credit: billolen

For a handout, download the PDF document outlining this assignment.

Objectives:

In this assignment, students are asked to create a GoogleMap to map a topic.

GoogleMaps allows students to create their own journeys and annotate place markers with text and multimedia content; they can upload their own photos to their map, link to YouTube clips, write text and link to blogs and other kinds of websites. This free service encourages them to build maps that tell stories in a visually interesting, geographically situated way, and all sorts of people, from news agencies to public transportation services, are now using maps to create new kinds of content (commonly called 'mashups'). GoogleMaps shows how fun and creative writing on the web can really be. With no experience and lots of imagination students can join the most creative people currently delivering content on the web.

In this assignment students will literally "map" a topic of their own choosing that relates to globalization. In other words, they are going to use the multimedia environment of GoogleMaps to tell their story and present their research to the rest of the class (and the rest of the world, if they wish!).

Materials/Equipment:

Internet access and a Google Account.

Preparation:

Students need to be taught how to navigate GoogleMaps. Fortunately, GoogleMaps are really easy to use. These introductory videos will show you the basics. Here’s the page that gives you step-by-step instructions on how to build your map. This YouTube video shows you how to create interactive place markers. Finally, Google Maps Mania is a great blog that shows how people are using GoogleMaps around the world. It provides links to hundreds of maps and is a great place to start thinking about your own map.

Procedure:

Midterm maps due: week 10/28

Final Map Due: 12/4

Accompanying Paper: due 12/4

Assignment Specifics:

The map will be evaluated as a Learning Record work sample. So, be sure to make observations about what you are learning as you are creating your map and use the work samples as a way of building your research. A draft of the map is due the week of 10/28, when we will spend the week on presentations of your maps. The ﬁnal map is due the last day of class as a work sample in your LR. In addition, you need to produce a two-page, single-spaced explanation of your choices for the map. In this short paper you will explain the idea behind the map—the intended audience, the choice of sources, why you chose that particular layout. etc.

My criteria for assessing your map are simple: how well do you use the map technology? How clear is the story you are trying to tell? How do you balance writing in the map with multimedia content? Will this map be useful and legible for your deﬁned audience? Will they understand what this map is about without having been in this class?

There are a number of ways you can ﬁll in your map. It must have at least 8 placemarkers that contain text, and some sort of reference to other multimedia resources (photos, hyperlinks, YouTube clips etc). The writing must by your own, though you obviously can use links to other text, audio and visual material to help tell your story. Part of the skill you will develop will be to decide what information to write into the placemarker and what you will leave to your hyperlinked sources. For example, how well can you tell the story within your map without forcing your audience to jump to other websites to ﬁll in the gaps? These are the kinds of important choices you must make. The success of your map will depend on the clarity of your writing, what sources you use and how you incorporate them, and the overall coherence of the project (in other words, can the reader easily understand the whole idea behind the map?).

You will need to do some research, but that research could include your own photographs (or photos you ﬁnd on the web); your own interview or podcast (or one you ﬁnd on the web), a really cool YouTube clip, or an informative website or blog. Remember, your GoogleMap and midterm paper can be on the same topic, so research for the map can count as an opportunity to develop your research for your midterm paper. The only real rules are that the map must in some way relate to the ideas we are talking about in class. It must be informative (in other words, it shows research) and there must be writing to assess. DON’T present me with just a bunch of photos or hyperlinks; it’s how you write about them that counts.

Presentations will be on the week of 10/28. The feedback you get from the class during these presentations you will be able to clarify your ideas and build a better map. After the presentations you will buddy with two other classmates. For the rest of the semester, you will be helping each other evaluate your maps using the map rating function built into GoogleMaps.

Critical Cartography: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Google Maps is a godsend—in our daily lives, we use the site to find a new place to live, track the settings of a public controversy, catch lawbreakers in the act, and claim land that’s been long-contested. Border scuffles and all, Google Maps is helping us reimagine the terrains, cities, and spaces of the real world. It was only a matter of time before we witnessed the melding of Google Maps virtual and Real World spatial. That time is now: Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl has spent the last five years working on a project that brings Google Maps’ digital location markers into real city spaces. His installations in different cities in Europe and Asia—all entitled “Map”—ask us to question the lines between real and virtual, center and periphery.

Known for his work with “Dead Drops,” the USB sticks that were installed in bricks of urban buildings to encourage free and anonymous sharing, Bartholl has long been toying with the false dichotomy between digitized and lived experience. His art is a reminder that digital environments have their own spatial representations, and that these spaces have ramifications in our lived lives.

With “Map,” Bartholl makes us question real and digital, center and periphery, through an installation involving a massive 600x350x35 cm wood sculpture of the iconic red location markers in Google Maps. With the help of a tow truck and a crane, the location marker was placed in the center of the city (two example locations for the installation were Taipei and Berlin).

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

From the pictures on Bartholl’s website, the markers are hard to distinguish from their digital counterparts. Both the digital markers and the “real” markers cast shadows. Both are perky punctuations in urban environments. Which of the markers is more real? Bartholl seems to nudge us in the direction of wondering whether this question matters anymore.

To further drive home how much effect Google Maps has on our ideas about places, Bartholl’s city center is the one that Google Maps provides when you search for the city. That center could be in an intersection, in a verdant wooded area, or in a dilapidated housing complex. Whatever the case, Bartholl’s installation asks us to question our ideas of center and periphery. What if your idea of the center of Berlin is different than the center of Berlin in Google Maps? What does the “center” of the city even mean in a digitized world?

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Bartholl’s work with the icons of Google Maps reminds us that maps are political productions. With maps, borders are drawn, districts are re-zoned, centers are marked. As geographers Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier argue in their “Introduction to Critical Cartography,” geographic knowledge is power, and hence, is political. With his cartographic installations, Aram Bartholl’s message is a political one; his work makes us rethink the boundaries that we have created when mapping digital and real, center and periphery, Google Maps or mental maps.

Mapping Religious Adherence: Association of Religion Data Archives

ladysquires — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 01:45:12 +0000

(Image Credits: Association of Religion Data Archives)

What do people mean when they say that the United States is a religious nation, or even a Christian nation? The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) compiles data taken from census records and surveys to provide comprehensive information on expressions of faith throughout the nation. Of particular interest to this blog is the impressive interactive map database that allows you to choose and compare data sets in order to gain specific information about rates of adherence, denominational affiliation, and demographics. I have used these in my Literature and Religion class to help students begin to think about the relationship between faith and other socio-cultural forces, such as immigration patterns and socio-economic changes in a region.

The map above shows proportional rates of religous adherence for all denominations nationwide. The darker a state is, the more religious it is. It is perhaps no suprirse that the Midwest and parts of the Deep South show the highest rates of adherence, but it is perhaps a bit counterintuitive that parts of the Northeast--New York and Massachusetts in particular--seem to be roughly on par with Mormon-dominated Utah and Oklahoma and is actually more religious than any of the states that constitute the Deep South. As you compare this map to maps that show adherence to specific denominations, a story begins to emerge.

As you can see here, Evangelical Christian affliation tends to be concentrated in the area we think of as the "Bible Belt," not exactly a surprise.

Perhaps equally unsurprising is the fact that Catholicism tends to be concentrated in the Southwest and Northeast, areas which are known for thier concentrations of Irish, Italian, and Hispanic families. This suggests that is, indeed, the high rate of Catholic affiliation that is driving the suprisingly high proportion of religious adherence in the "Godless North." In fact, proportionally, there are more Catholics per 1000 people in the Northeast than there are Evangelicals per 1000 in the South. What this data cannot tell us, however, is what adherence actually looks like. People may express a cultural or familial affiliation with the Catholic Church, for example, even if they haven't attended mass in 15 years. Religious adherence is, after all, often as much about cultural identification as it is about faith.

The database allows literally thousands of possible comparisons and allows you to examine data down to the state and county level. One can look at rates of religious adherence and compare them to demongraphic data on immigration, gender, voting trends, crime rates, proportion of men to women, urban vs. rural population concentrations, rates of new housing development, percentage of kids in private vs. public school, occupations, education levels, and how long it takes people to get to work in the morning. For example, below I took a look specifically at Texas and compared overall rates of religious adherence to the age of the population.

This is a comparison I don't quite know how to interpret. It shows rates of religious adherence becoming higher where the population is younger, when common wisdom suggests that younger generations tend to be less religious than their parents. Perhaps it is significant that the younger counties tend to also be border counties where the proportion of people who immigrated here in the last twenty years tends to be much higher. Age might simply be a correlation or it might indicate higher levels of cultural cohesiveness, where children identify with the values of their parents much more strongly.

This one, however, isn't really a surprise. The Evangelical Lutheran Church tends to be associated with higher concentrations of descendents of German and Scandinavian immigrants, and as you can see, it tends to be particularly concentrated (though the numbers are obviously statistically small) in that area between Austin and San Antonio usually associated with German heritage.

I could go on and on. If you do anything with religion, this is a great site for students to explore and play with. It is extremely user-friendly and has the potential to challenge what we think we know about religion in the United States. It also presents an excellent opportunity to talk about how we interpret data, correlation vs. causation, and statistical significance.

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.

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.

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.

Mapping Relations

EmilyBloom — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:54:12 +0000

Image Credit: New York Times

Family trees are distinctively antiquated visual representations, yet they remain ubiquitous. In the past week alone, The Boston Herald published a family tree by the New England Historic Genealogical Society showing that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are related and New York Times ran an interactive tree based on the research of genealogist Megan Smolenyak documenting Michelle Obama’s family history. Both maps include the very familiar hierarchical arrangement of lines and circles or squares. The Damon-Affleck map cuts right to the chase, foregoing all other strands, and directly linking the actors to William Knowlton Jr. (1615-1655). The First Lady’s genealogy is much more interested in the journey than the destination; each node of the tree has a short description of the family member and links to their genealogical record. Looking at these two maps, I was led to consider why the family tree endures despite the wealth of technologies available for re-mapping relationships? Why does the old visual arrangement of radiating lines still seem to capture our attention? And finally, what are we really mapping when we map kinship on a family tree?

Most immediately, the family tree implies the presence of roots—a metaphor that Alex Haley significantly mined in his book and miniseries. The Times (London) used a similar visual metaphor in a family tree for Barack Obama in which they, rather tastelessly, represent his African ancestors as the roots and his American ancestors as the tree.

Image Credit: Times (London)

Issues of subterranity are rendered even more explicit by trees revealing hidden histories, particularly, as in the case of Michelle Obama’s geneology, histories of slavery, interracial kinship and upward mobility. On the New York Times’ “Room for Debate,” scholars discuss the significance and meanings of Michelle Obama’s family tree. Among these voices, several expressed doubt about whether the family tree can generate significant public debate on the issues it reveals. As Mary Frances Berry writes, “race-mixture stories have attracted sustained public interest only when some celebrity or a president, as in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, is involved.” Other scholars lamented the inability of the genealogical chart to tell the history it purports to represent. Martha Hodges writes that the simple line connecting two individuals does not reveal the violence that could be contained in that encounter, particularly between a slave girl and an unknown white forbearer. On the other hand, Ira Berlin points out that the connecting line not only obliterates violence, but also other complicated emotional connections between individuals. In both cases, the family tree does not depict affective ties—whether those of pain, shame, betrayal, love or joy.

Image Credit Left: Clauset, Moore and Newman in Nature

Image Credit Right: The Boston Herald

In a recent article in Nature, “Networks: Teasing out the missing links,” Sid Reidner describes the limitations of the family tree's “highly unrealistic, insular population” in our age of increasingly complex social organizations. Reidner cites work by Aaron Clauset, Cristopher Moore & M. E. J. Newman in creating a "hierarchical random graph" that represents the links omitted in a standard family tree. While the creators of this model use it to predict relationships when information is missing, this chart also offers an interesting visual representation of relations that emphasizes the multiplicity of links, rather than the simple procreative line. While a much messier affair, the Clauset, Moore and Newman model makes for a more compelling glimpse into the Affleck-Damon connection, for instance, than a tree– no matter how deep the roots.

Witness the artifact of the process

Jillian Sayre — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:56:55 +0000

Derek Mueller over at Earth Wide Moth posted an interesting meditation on Google's recent mapping of the famously lost city of Atlantis.

Google's spokesperson addressed interest in the image by clarifying the lines, taken for ruins, that mark the ocean floor. S/he said in an email: "What users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process...The fact that there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world's oceans."

Derek's post (found here) focuses on this very issue of method, of the discovery of the trace even if it is not the trace of a lost civilization. Instead, on the map, we are left with signs or remnants of the mapper. Derek says:

"The conspiracy doesn't interest me all that much. Instead, I'm struck by the impression: the stamp left by the "systematic" tracing, the residue of the surface-to-sea-floor method (a term others have smartly untangled it into meta-hodos or something like 'beyond ways', even 'ways beyond'; this etymological dig lingers with me). The deep blue grid of "bathymetric data" elicits questions: why don't we see these in the adjacent areas? What was it about this boat, this collection process, this translation from sound to image, that left behind the vivid trails?"

It reminds me of recent work done on mind mapping in the Computer Writing and Research Lab here at UT:

Sean McCarthy recently presented on this tool and the alternative methods it offers not only for essayistic composition but also course organization and tracing resources.

You can find examples from his presentation here.

Visualizing GDP

Nate Kreuter — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:47:33 +0000

I found an interesting post on Reason magazine's Hit & Run blog in which the Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) of various nations are correlated with the GDPs of US states. The map is a fascinating comment on global economics, and more info on its background is available through the original Hit & Run post.

The Hit & Run blog, incidentally, is a product of the libertarian publication Reason, which, regardless of what you think of its politics, is a good place to troll for stories pertaining to visual culture. I also like to use to site to dig for news stories to use in rhetoric classes, because they are frequently argumentative and also because they tangle the typical left vs. right allegiances many of my students follow blindly, which I find allows me to open up controversies like immigration in productive ways. Again, this isn't an endorsement of the blog's specific politics, but definitely is an endorsement of its detail-oriented, non-mainstream news coverage.