Teaching geography with literary mapping: A didactic experiment

The relationship between maps and literature has long been debated from both narrative and geographical perspectives. At the core of this contribution are so-called reader generated mappings, mapping practices performed after the reading of a literary text. The aim of this article is to suggest possible didactic directions for teaching geography through geo-visualisations based on the reading of literary texts. In particular, this research draws from the results of a literary mapping workshop attended by students during an introductory human geography course at the University of Padua (Italy). Focusing on one of the literary mappings performed by the students, namely the mapping of a short story written by the Italian writer Mario Rigoni Stern, a deductive process is used to understand the possible future potentialities of literary mapping in didactics. Analysing the students\u2019 literary maps, this article aims to direct attention to literary mapping practices as constellations of learning moments to exploit. The reading of the text, the envisioning and creation of the map are here explored as the steps of a complex practice capable of visually developing geographical knowledge

Exploring narrativity in data visualization in journalism

Many news stories are based on data visualization, and storytelling with data has become a buzzword in journalism. But what exactly does storytelling with data mean? When does a data visualization tell a story? And what are narrative constituents in data visualization? This chapter first defines the key terms in this context: story, narrative, narrativity, showing and telling. Then, it sheds light on the various forms of narrativity in data visualization and, based on a corpus analysis of 73 data visualizations, describes the basic visual elements that constitute narrativity: the instance of a narrator, sequentiality, temporal dimension, and tellability. The paper concludes that understanding how data are transformed into visual stories is key to understanding how facts are shaped and communicated in society

Dynamic literature mapping : typography in screen-based media

This paper chronicles the development of a visual map representing a literature search on key theorists and thinkers in two principal topics: Typography and New Media. Its aim is to visualise and facilitate conceptual connections between key ideas and philosophies across disciplines. This literature map was drawn up by reviewing available influential literature within these topics. Related categories were later added and a further series of literature searches were conducted to build references in each topic. This on-going cyclical process serves to construct a comprehensive contextual map of knowledge. The benefit of the map is twofold. Primarily, aiding the researcher to navigate and understand complex layers of information. Secondly, allowing the researcher to present and share representations of knowledge. The clarity of the representation is crucial in eliciting the participation of fellow design researchers and practitioners to the development and growth of the literature map

Tagging time in prolog : the temporality effect project

This article combines a brief introduction into a particular philosophical theory of "time" with a demonstration of how this theory has been implemented in a Literary Studies oriented Humanities Computing project. The aim of the project was to create a model of text-based time cognition and design customized markup and text analysis tools that help to understand ‘‘how time works’’: more precisely, how narratively organised and communicated information motivates readers to generate the mental image of a chronologically organized world. The approach presented is based on the unitary model of time originally proposed by McTaggart, who distinguished between two perspectives onto time, the so-called A- and B-series. The first step towards a functional Humanities Computing implementation of this theoretical approach was the development of TempusMarker—a software tool providing automatic and semi-automatic markup routines for the tagging of temporal expressions in natural language texts. In the second step we discuss the principals underlying TempusParser—an analytical tool that can reconstruct temporal order in events by way of an algorithm-driven process of analysis and recombination of textual segments during which the "time stamp" of each segment as indicated by the temporal tags is interpreted

Comics and authorship : an introduction

If media authorship can be understood "as a site of cultural tension" (Johnson and Gray 2013, 10), then a deeper understanding of comics authorship will also provide clues regarding the sustaining—and constraining— of creative practices in other media ecologies and intermedial interactions (such as, for instance, adaptations). For comics, this implies combining insights from comics scholars, practitioners as well as agents involved in the publication and dissemination of comics. This issue, building on the findings of extant scholarship on authorship in comics and other media, hopes to provide incentive for further adventures into the (almost) unknown of comics authorship

The traces left by the information designer. Data visualization and enunciation

A common understanding considers information design to be a clear and immediate transfer of information, in which the author disappears to make the data emerge with utmost clarity. This idea of infographics as a transparent and objective medium is questioned by several scholars and practitioners who consider visualization not just as a representation of numbers, but as an interpretative device. In this essay, we will review these positions, with special regard to the use of the semiotic concept of enunciation, which is also beginning to be used in critical design theory and digital humanities. This concept allows us to detect the traces of the act of enunciation in the visual artefact. In particular, we will deal with the recognition of visualization as an act of interpretation, the visual calibration and distancing from one’s statement in journalism and scientific communication and the visual reference to the production process in graphic design

Using Data Visualisation to tell Stories about Collections

The paper explores visualisation of “big data” from digitised museum collections and archives, focusing on the relationship between data, visualisation and narrative. A contrast is presented between visualisations that show “just the data” and those that present the information in such a way as to tell a story using visual rhetorical devices; such devices have historically included trees, streams, chains, geometric shapes and other forms. The contrast is explored through historical examples and a survey of current practice. A discussion centred on visualising datasets from the British Library, Science Museum and Wellcome Library is used to outline key research questions

Vonnegut\u27s composite work : the importance of illustration in Breakfast of champions.

This paper examines Kurt Vonnegut\u27s 1973 novel, Breakfast of Champions, in the context of word-image theory and multimedia publication. Drawing from the critical discourse surrounding the illuminated manuscripts of William Blake, the paper discusses Vonnegut\u27s experimentation with a composite work and re-evaluates the significance of the novel in light of this innovation