How can we map stories? A cybercartographic application for narrative cartography

Abstract

Narratives and places are deeply connected. Places often contribute to the shaping of a story, just as stories contribute to the production of spatial identities. Mapping narratives can thus have a double goal: to explore the geographic structure of a story, and to better understand the impact of stories on the production of places. While it may be easy to locate narratives as points on a map, this type of representation is rarely relevant in capturing and characterising the complex spatio-temporal dimensions of the narratives. In this paper, we present a cyber-cartographic application designed to address this issue and provide solutions to help properly map some of the many dimensions of narratives, including the places of the narration (geography), the connection between these places (geometry), as well as the temporal dimension inherent to storytelling. This application, originally developed to map contemporary Canadian cinematographic narratives (see examples here: http://scaquard. classone-tech.com/), opens new perspectives and raises a range of issues to mapping a multitude of stories, including fictional work, vernacular knowledge, personal experience and collective memories.

Comic Strip Narratives in Time Geography

“…The central challenge in synthesizing maps and stories together into a narrative map, is to retain emotional vitality while also rendering geographic information correctly and systematically [13]. We can look to art, adapting artistic methods and techniques for this purpose and this activity is partLinking the artistic with the conventional map ("anti-map/map").…”

“…Breaking the narrative into 'geographic bits and pieces', requires issues such as imprecision, multiple scales, and in the case of fictional accounts, a mix of real-world and made-up places, to be managed so that a clear narrative rhythm is maintained. Caquard and Fiset offer cartographic solutions to these challenges [13], also discussed in Section 4. In their cinematic This set of conditions is met by the 3D space-time cube, (a 'space' capable of capturing narrative lines, as connections between places) but with fully interactive facilities for free exploration of narrative [27,51].…”

“…Breaking the narrative into 'geographic bits and pieces', requires issues such as imprecision, multiple scales, and in the case of fictional accounts, a mix of real-world and made-up places, to be managed so that a clear narrative rhythm is maintained. Caquard and Fiset offer cartographic solutions to these challenges [13], also discussed in Section 4. In their cinematic narrative context, location and duration are communicated through proportional symbols and line texture is used to distinguish between physical and 'projected' (where the narrative actors are interacting remotely e.g., via a phone call) connections [13].…”

“…In a story composed of words and pictures, the user is 'told' about geography to give a sense of place as well as space, but the reader is an observer (as opposed to a director or actor; [50]). In mapping cinematic narrative, the need was recognized to capture places, connections among places and the passage of time [13]. In this case, the user can have enough control to follow a linear or non-linear narrative-an example is given of a pictorial landscape with different features that can be followed for different located stories [9].…”

“…Fundamentally, traditional narratives, such as those told through written stories, comics or films, involve place as well as space, and indeed often drive a story's 'shape' [42]. Typically, the places in traditional stories are mappable and thus, form the geographic structure of the narrative, "stories contribute to the production of spatial identities" ( [13], p. 18). Simple geographical locations alone (i.e., mapped points) are limited in "capturing and characterizing the complex spatio-temporal dimensions of narratives" ( [3], p. 18) and this directs us toward a requirement that map narratives manifest themselves geometrically in higher dimension features, such as lines (central to this research) and areas.…”