Travel & StoryMapping

Travel literature continues to be a well-loved genre. In our contemporary world, we have travel shows, books, and blogs to name only a few genres of dissemination. People writing about their experiences is not a new thing and students’ general familiarity with the genre can provide a relatively smooth entry into the literature of the past - as well as give a personal flair to our understanding of the past world.

This lesson plan focuses on three layers of units that can be mixed and matched as preferred. Each lesson can stand alone, but instructors are encouraged to do all three in sequential order.

The first focuses on teaching students how to read published travel literature for bias, goals, and audience. The second lesson emphasizes the transition between semi-structure to structured data with an emphasis on spatial data (longitude and latitude) with the aim of encouraging students to understand experience as bounded to place. The third lesson encourages students to connect the personal narrative with place and other, related ephemera in order to have students think about the narrative in a world filled with details.

Examples of possible final projects:

  • Knightlab StoryMap: https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/ce3be3ff56ef1d5c6bdaac3db925a73d/mary-seacole/index.html
  • Arcgis Storymap: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/dd83835edabc4dc899309d1121c72dd2
  • Leaflet Storymap: https://mnaglak.github.io/googlesheet-leafletstorymap/

Recommended Goals

  • Encourage students to think about historical actors as people with detailed, four dimensional experiences. 
  • Emphasize contact between different groups across the globe. 
  • Introduce students into working with semi-structured data (i.e., the travel narratives) and transforming it into structured data (i.e., data sheet in Excel or other program). 
  • Explore the idea of spatial data (i.e., latitude and longitude) and learn how to work with it. 
  • Compose a Storymap to bring together narrative, contextual, and spatial data into an analytical, historical narrative. 
     
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