Mapping Narratives with the Geoweb
Sébastien Caquard & Jean-Pierre Fiset
Proposal
Although the recognition of the relevance of films as a unique source of geographic information
has grown since the 1990s, very few attempts have been made to develop original cartographic
applications to maps these cinematographic places. Mapping cinematographic narratives requires
overcoming two major challenges. First, it calls for the transformation of complex audiovisual
material into geographic data, which is a recurrent issue in geography. Once the narrative is
broken down into geographic pieces, these pieces need to be mapped properly. The development
of specific cartographic forms is the second major challenge faced by narrative cartography.
To begin, a narrative map must represent simultaneously places and relationships between places.
In literary cartography there is a distinction between geography (location) and geometry
(connection). As emphasized by Moretti (2005), a map is associated to geography and places,
while a diagram is related to the geometry of the relationships between elements of the story (e.g.
characters, places). In literary cartography, the geometry is at least as important as the geography
since it demonstrates that there was a process involved in the production of the structure (Moretti
2005). In other words, mapping narratives requires representing simultaneously the geometry and
the geography of the narrative in order to capture the richness and the intrinsic structure of the
story, as well as their relationships to real places. Secondly, mapping narratives also requires
taking into account the spatio-temporal dimensions inherent to storytelling. As Doreen Massey
(2005, 130) points out (in the context of mapping personal stories), stories cannot be represented
“as points or areas on maps, but as integrations of space and time; as spatio-temporal events.”
(Emphasis in the original). The process of mapping narratives calls for the development of
particular forms of maps that capture simultaneously the spatio-temporal dimension of the
narrative, as well as both its geometry and geography. These challenges provide the framework
for developing a specific application for mapping narratives.
This paper presents a geoweb application developed to address these issue. This application has
been designed by pulling together different tools available in different open source JavaScript
libraries. This tool has been used to map the narratives of twenty contemporary Canadian films.
On the map, the stories unfold between anchoring points and movements are provided by the
connections between them, revealing the geographic structures of Canadian cinematographic
territories. This first attempt to map narratives can have multiple applications to help map and
characterize a wide variety of stories. It can be used in different domains such as literary maps, as
well as to convey personal stories, including to the mapping of vernacular knowledge.
1
How to turn this project into a movie?
We propose to turn this project into a movie using a “montage parallel”: one track showing the
cartographic result applied to one selected film (e.g. Bon Cop Bad Cop), while the other track
would explain in parallel the conceptual, methodological and technological challenges associated
to this application. Let see in more details how we envision it.
With this application, the results are mapped on a Google background map. The data are rendered
through time using a slider control. This temporal representation follows the temporal structure of
the narration: points and lines appear and grow while the story unfolds. We propose to use the
narrative structure of this animated map as one track of our movie. This track would start at the
local scale (e.g. Montreal for Bon Cop Bad Cop) and would zoom back while the different places
unfold (Note: this zoom back would be in reference to the movie Power of Tens which inspired
the development of Google Earth). Selected dialogs from BCBC would be used as the sound track
to help the audience link the map with the movie mapped. In a parallel track we could present in
a more descriptive/pedagogical way the major conceptual, methodological and technologic
characteristics of the application. Both tracks could be edited in parallel (“Montage parallel”) to
stimulate the curiosity of the audience and to avoid the film to become too didactic. Toward the
end the zoom back would go beyond the extent of the map of Bon Cop Bad Cop, revealing the 20
narrative maps created during this project. At this point the two tracks would merge: the first
track would remain visual showing the geographic structure of the narratives of all these movies,
while the soundtrack would describe the major funding associated with the systematic
cartography of these movies. This would allow to conclude the movie by presenting the final
objective and results of this project: identifying patterns in the places portrayed in contemporary
Canadian cinema, and discussing how these patterns reveal elements of contemporary Canadian
society.
Here are some screenshots to illustrate the general idea
Track 1A: The film starts
locally (Montréal) where the
action of the movie BonCop
Bac Cop starts to unfold
Track 1B: The camera is
zooming back while the
geography of this film
continues to unfold
Track 1C: The overall geography
of BC is finally revealed and the
audience understands the link
between the
Track 3. The camera continues to zoom bac
revealing the existence of 20 other films as
well as geographic structures and patterns
Note: Track 2 is not illustrated here, but would present the major conceptual, methodological and
technological elements associated with the development of this application.
2