Our work with GIS mapping tools is coming along well. Laura and I have each been individually playing with some different ways of analyzing The Blue Hour and making maps accordingly to visualize the data.
The dataset we are primarily working with is a spreadsheet of all the locations mentioned in the text. The spreadsheet holds the name, latitude, longitude, sentence number, and context in which the location name was used. My first reaction after manually browsing the data was that the context in which locations were mentioned can vary greatly. For example, the mention of a United Kingdom city could either refer to a place Jean Rhys actually visited, or it could be mentioned in reference to another person’s hometown and have very little to do with Rhys herself. I added a new column to the dataset, and labelled each location based on the sentence it was mentioned. For simplicity’s sake, I labelled an entry “A” if it was used to discuss somewhere Jean Rhys was actually visiting, and “B” for other contexts, which were primarily mentions of another person’s whereabouts.
After creating the new column, I mapped all the points using CartoDB, a great online mapping tool, and changed their color according to that column. Points referring to a visit by Jean Rhys appeared red, and other points appeared blue. After cleaning up the map and finalizing it, I plan to post it on the site as a picture, rather than embed the interactive map itself, as only one interactive map can embedded onto WordPress (without a premium CartoDB account). Fortunately, this map doesn’t require the interactive side of things for it to be a useful visualization.
After our meeting tomorrow, I will determine which, if any, other GIS visualizations will be useful for the site, and we will finalize those in the coming week.
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