https://arcg.is/0yXnby

I made a story map based on the television series Vampire Diaries, which was primarily filmed in Covington, Georgia. The series is based on books written by L.J. Smith who follows the life of a teen, Elena Gilbert, in a mysterious town full of supernatural beings. Part of the reason I chose this tv series/book was because all of the locations are real places and the story takes place in multiple locations. I thought this would be good for the exercise due to the varied locations and because I enjoyed the books and show. I learned that all the story locations were in really close proximity to each other in both the story and for filming. This re-affirms the notion present in the plot that the story takes place in a small town where everyone is close to each other and knows everyone’s business. 

From my mapmaking experience, I have learned a unique strategy to graphically organize elements of books and stories. By identifying story settings on a map, I am better able to organize plot points as well. I have also learned a new tool that I can utilize in the future for other purposes as well. For example, in class we used presidential libraries as our locations, and it taught me a lot about how dispersed the museums are and where they take place. Something about seeing it visually on a map actually allowed me to identify where they are most prominent, and has inspired me to visit ones that I am close to. 

Additionally, we learned how to use Arc-GIS in class where we created two maps: Count of Presidential Libraries and Museums and the US States version. Each map shows you different things based on how many layers you include, and how you display the data. These maps can show you a variety of things such as aggregate points, join features, center and dispersion, and attributes from one layer or table to another based on spatial and attribute relationships. It takes all the points you included on the map and analyzes them and provides you with not only a visual aid but also a summary of how they are related. 

Johanna Drucker has many concerns about spatialization of texts, but the one that stuck out to me regards representing a large copra of texts and immense archives. The author states that this is a challenge because “the conventions of wayfinding and navigation that are part of print media and its institutional structures are not yet reworked in a digital environment meant to address the shifts in scale and experience brought on by new media.” She points out one more major concern in addition to this which is giving graphical expression to interpretations built on documents, or collections of documents. Acts of interpretation use format features of graphical presentation to produce the content of these artifacts which can sometimes underpin the graphical visualizations. Additionally, the conventional graphical features of texts “that inscribe interpretation do not show or model interpretation on the fly as a constitutive act of reading, relating, connecting, and sense making”.

The reason I included both of these major concerns is because they both relate to each other in many ways. Johanna Drucker elaborates on the main point that digital environments have trouble re-working the data they are given in a way that accurately connects and relates the information. While digital environments are really good at making correlations and inferring information based on data, it is not always accurate and we should treat it as such. However, these same digital environments despite their downfalls can also produce really interesting and helpful results that teach us a lot about topics we may have otherwise not been able to learn from. 

Cited Source:

Humanities approaches to graphical display. (n.d.). Retrieved March 08, 2021, from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html