Mapping from Texts

Written by Victoria Morse. Edited by Alan Zheng. Reviewed by Austin Mason and Aaron Young

Introduction

Outlines the problem the recipe is trying to fix or the goal of the technique being addressed.

Understanding the full range of ways in which human beings have conceptualized space often requires using all the types of sources we have, as well as various approaches to analyzing those sources. We analyze visual representations of space (including maps, paintings etc.), performative and ritual representations of space, and very frequent written texts that express spatial concepts and experiences. How do you move from a textual evidence to a map without letting the map itself distort the cultural ideas of the originating culture?

Ingredients

What do you need to know or have set up in order to follow the recipe. An application installed, a plugin activated, familiarity with a certain programming language, etc.

Hints, callouts and or warnings can be highlighted here as necessary

Text that is prepared for digital analysis. [see handout on preparing text]

Preparatory work to understand what types of places are in the text (precise places? Loosely defined regions? Imaginary places?). What is the hierarchy of the places you want to map, using what symbols? [add information on symbols and hierarchy] Some online text mining tools can help with this? [do we want to mention Voyant here?]

How to do it‌

Step by step instructions required to follow the recipe

How it works

A detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section, so we are not perpetuating technology "black boxes" but helping people understand how to take control.

This section can include code snippets of CSS, JavaScript, Python, etc.

as appropriate

Further Resources

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This section can be used to give additional information to make the reader more knowledgeable about specific aspects of the recipe, or provide helpful links to other useful information.