Mapping Fiction

Literally.

(I’m wondering how spatial, locative applications like google maps might be used in our term projects – in addition to narrative/fiction overlays, what about critical/theory-based ones, or some combination of the two?)

2 thoughts on “Mapping Fiction

  1. Graham

    That was really interesting to read, and whereas I feel like hypertext narratives can threaten to obstruct the narrative itself with the hyper part, that actually worked really well.
    It actually made me think of comics, which use pictures and words together to deliver the narrative. Following Rick on google maps didn’t disrupt the written story and I found that the map part actually added more than I’d expected to the story. It was gimmicky, and the story didn’t necessarily need it, but it benefitted from it.
    I should probably leave a disclaimer that says I kind of nerd out about maps and spend free time looking at cities and international roadways on google maps anyway.

  2. Matthew Blunderfield Post author

    yeah, it was mentioned today how JAckson’s writing, as a whole, seemed in some ways to be impeded by the linking – it gave the text, or the experience of reading it a feeling of claustrophobia, or limits, constrictions etc. due primarily to the fact there’s this huge lack of visible context from one passage to the next. Beyond the general story map, which arguably obstructs as much as it elucidates, we’re left in the immediacy of whatever text/moment is on display, like walking through fog. Cummings instead could be thought of as making a kind of perspectival inversion with his hypertext, exposing a landscape of possibility where the broader ‘terrain’ of Jackson’s work is occluded.

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