Production Project B: Geo-Narrative Rationale

For production project B i decided i would create a geo-narrative. As with the other assessments i had not been exposed to such a thing, in fact i did not even know what it was. A geo-narrative (Geographical narrative) is a story told through geography. As the assignments asks, i completed mine through Google Maps. Online, this is the best way to complete it and although i am always using Google maps, previous to this assignment i had no idea it was a feature. I immediately thought to re-tell my recent travels overseas but quickly changed my mind as they may not be viewed as interesting as a fictional tale, so i went with my short-narrative 'Tour le Med'.

Penguin Publishers had released a series of 'Digital fictions' on their website and one of them is a geo-narrative entitled 'The 21 Steps'. I had a look at this to give me an idea of what to expect and it's a really indepth tale. I believe the geographical element in google maps make's the story far more interesting and i'd say that while my story is much shorter and less detailed i have followed the main structure of a geo-narrative. Due to the fact that we had to keep our narrative relatively short, i feel the introduction of images to each marker-point filled the story. I like that in the story i could skip large amounts of time forward without taking away from the meaning, because it is based on different locations. In other words, the images and mapping mean that the author doesn't necessarily have to tell all parts of the story for it to make sense.

I would suggest one of the negatives is when the geo-narrative is complete there are certain elements that remain unpolished. For instance, when the reader goes to each point, the narrative part of the story is not always centred on the screen and the map is at various different zoom levels. These are minor faults and it could also be argued that this gives the reader more space to interact with the medium by selecting where they want the box to be and how much zoom they want.

Though i had to complete this as part of my networked media assesment, i'm considering using it in the future. It's a fun and user-friendly way of documenting travels or adding an interactive quality to an otherwise one-way narrative, a new aspect to networked media. I'm interested to see the possibilities and extra developments that could occur in the future if other sites use the Google Maps API for geo-narratives.


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