Digital Humanities and Narrative
April 2, 2024
Selection
Digital repositories or collections often avoid a prescribed path. That doesn’t mean they are without argument.
Selection (cont.)
Sequence/order
- Of events, items
- Chronological, spatial, temporal, thematic
- Linear/nonlinear
- Static/interactive
Sequence/order 2
Sequence/order 3
Absence/presence
"For colonial elites, if black women could not be used or possessed as laboring, sordid, or lecherous subjects, they received little or no mention—but black women did not disappear... Instead of pausing at empirical silence or accepting it at face value, surfacing silence in the empirical, imperial archive as having a value—a null value—imbues absence with disruption and possibility."
Johnson, Jessica Marie. Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.Absence/presence 2
- Surfacing the lives of enslaved people from a historical record that was not made for or by them
Absence/presence 3
Researching locations from war letters, including censored ones, and representing them on a map
A comparison
Narrative map characteristics
- Tells a story plotted through space
- Different from a thematic or data map: the point is to provide a visual counterpart to the implicit spatial underpinnings of a narrative or argument (Mullen 2015)
- Has applications in multiple disciplines (Guldi 2011)
Motivations
- Narrative maps are usually web-based, often interactive, and offer a method and an interface for reaching a broader audience.
- A way of telling a story from a variety of overlapping, non-exclusive perspectives.
- Quite possibly a method of remediation or “practical repair” (HASTAC 2013). In other words, addressing political or cultural erasure, picking up where 2D systems of geographic representation leave off, representing that which is “hidden.”
Elements of a narrative map (aka what you need)
- A story arc: your interpretation of an area of inquiry
- A series of spatial events, possibly composed of actors, actions, locations, and times (Yuan, McIntosh, and Delozier 2015)
- Supporting sources, including textual ones, but also media, i.e. images, film, sound
- A mapping platform
Data maps inside of narratives
Narrative maps as implemented by ArcGIS StoryMaps have the potential to include data maps as a slide in your story. This is an option if you wish to show an overview of multiple locations (10+) at once.
Observations
| Description | City | Country |
|---|---|---|
| Mozart family starts tour | Salzburg | Austria |
| They arrive in Munich | Munich | Germany |
| Then they go to Mannheim | Mannheim | Germany |
Use a header row to describe your data; avoid special characters, spaces and numbers here. Place individual locations on rows underneath the header; 1 row = 1 location. Store each address element in its own cell.
Normalization
| Street | City | State | Zip | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 35 W Fifth St | Cincinnati | OH | 45202 | 2016-03-05T13:40:00z |
Store address elements and dates as text fields so that your spreadsheet application does not autoformat them and introduce errors. Use a machine readable format for dates and times, i.e. ISO 8601.
Geocoding
| old_city | old_country | new_city | new_country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Königsberg | Prussia | Kaliningrad | Russia |
Geocoding services need contemporary geopolitical information to work well. If you’re working with historical data, add some columns to record where the location is currently.
Geocoding 2
There are lots of options for geocoding your addresses. If you use Google Sheets, Geocode by Awesome Table is an option. For 10 or fewer locations, look them up manually using https://www.latlong.net/.