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Week 08: Time + Place

October 13, 2025

Texts to have read / watched
Writing to turn in
  • Reading responses from Yanni, Namrata, Amrita, Yixuan, and Li posted to the discussion forum

Plan for the day:

  • First half: Let’s discuss!
    • Warm-up writing
    • Reading responses & follow-ups
    • Writing to remember (inkshedding)
  • Second half: Let’s practice!
    • Project/presentation studio OR StoryMaps tutorial
  • Homework for next time:
    • Presentations, iteration 2 (processing)

First half: Let’s discuss!

Warm-up writing

Were there any features of the writing or presentation of information in this week’s readings that struck you as useful or worth imitating? Or, conversely, were there any features that you found alienating or made them difficult to read?

EXT: If you’re finished and waiting for the rest of us, find an example or two to illustrate what you had in mind.

Reading responses & follow-ups

Let’s discuss! And let’s please take some collaborative notes at bit.ly/dsam2025fall-notes. Any volunteers to take the lead?

In addition to the warm-up, we had these topics and questions from the discussion forum:

Avenues for research on – and reading of – visual storytelling

Yanni calls our attention to the three-part conclusion of Roth's survey of cartographic techniques, namely visual design, visual ethics, and visual literacy, pointing out that these are useful channels for our attention not only in designing maps but also "when we are on the receiving end of visually presented materials."

Perhaps he could say more?

Storytelling, poetry, teaching

Yanni cites Roth's claim that "all storytelling is an exercise in teaching" (108), which puts me in mind of a saying one of my teachers was fond of: that every poem is an ars poetica, i.e. that reading it teaches you anew how poetry works. Yet while Archibald MacLeish would conclude his own "Ars Poetica" on the instruction that "A poem should not mean / But be," Roth goes on to say that "As designers, it is not enough just to ‘show’, as we must also ‘explain’" (108).

So one question that emerges for me is: are these two ideas the same, or opposite?

Who builds GIS for the community, and by what means?

Namrata points to a gap in the discussion of Spatial Humanities by Murrieta-Flores and Martins, who write that "humanists aim to highlight not only that often History, Archaeology and Literature deal with symbolic, vague and imaginary space, but also with conceptions that can be different to those of the West or Modernity" (2426). She responds:

While I appreciate the acknowledgement of Spatial Humanities in recognizing different modalities through which non-Western communities think of space and place, I'm interested in the methods of GIS projects that focus on working with communities to build knowledge networks or just document their history. I'm particularly thinking about the ethical commitments surrounding such projects. Who should do projects related to specific communities? Who becomes part of the sample group for the community being studied? How compatible are GIS methodologies with the knowledge system and language of a community? For example, the art historian Ngarino Ellis talks about using Maori methodologies for the study of Maori art rather than western art historical methods. Can such methodologies be applied when using GIS?

What do we think? And does it matter what kind of GIS (cf. Zhao) we're talking about?

Maps as mediations

Responding to Zhao's delineation of four ways that GIS is integrated into modern human life (embodied, hermeneutical, autonomous, and background), Amrita raises a series of questions about "GIS as a mediator of human experience":

What specific ethical duties does a spatial historian have when their digital map [a simplified and mediated version of a complex historical reality] might become the dominant, taken-for-granted representation of that past event or place for the public? What does get inevitably "reduced" or silenced? As an architectural or spatial historian, how do I acknowledge limitations of the data collected on site and prevent my work from inadvertently marginalizing crucial, less “mappable”, aspects of history? Maps have been used for colonial domination and violence. How can spatial historians use counter-mapping techniques to push against colonial thinking that continues in the present? And more importantly, what are its scopes and limitations?

I don't know that we can answer for all times and places, but perhaps we can think through these questions together, and at least see which we expect to have stable answers (which we can then seek) and which will have to be re-asked throughout the process?

The seductive pleasures – or maybe pitfalls - of StoryMaps

Yixuan took up my invitation to read Allen Carrol's StoryMap about StoryMaps, "Nine Steps to Great Storytelling." (Quick show of hands: how many people got to this? Even if you haven't made it all the way through this particular reading, you can get the idea of this platform fairly quickly from one of the embedded videos.)

Yixuan writes:

Re-viewing the “Ten StoryMaps Tips” through media studies, I see the medium not as a neutral vessel but as a narrative co-author: zoom levels, color rhythm, and static-vs-interactive toggles pre-filter what becomes visible or invisible. McLuhan argued media extend the body, yet today’s templates standardize that extension, threading audience attention into an algorithmic metronome. Reading pleasure shifts from chewing text to a TikTok-like dopamine loop of “swipe-surprise-swipe.” This raises a worry, when the interface performs critical editing for us, how can slow reading—pause, reread, reflect—survive within seamless experience? Does digital humanities’ celebrated accessibility trade away hermeneutic depth?

Thoughts on this, perhaps drawing on Roth or any of our other readings?

If we get to inkshedding by around 10:15, that should leave us with enough time to share and break and still beat the 11:00 rush.

Writing to remember

Spend some time putting marks on a page to help you think through, and consolidate for yourself, what we discussed today. What do you want to remember? What are you left wondering?

After a few minutes, I’ll ask everyone to share one thing, to which we’ll all say, simply, “thank you.”

Break (10 minutes)

Assuming we left off at 10:35, let’s aim to start up again at 10:45 or so. That should beat most of the rush for 11am classes.

Second half: Let’s practice!

Studio options: presentation, processing, play

We have the second iteration of your project presentations due next week. I see three good options for the hands-on portion of today’s class:

  1. Work on your presentation file, realizing that – as a form of visual storytelling – it might benefit from attention to the structures, genres, and/or tropes that Roth catalogs in his piece on cartographic design. How will you establish the problem context or key characters in the first act of your presentation? What form of rising action will you use to develop toward a climax? Will you resolve your tensions, or end on a cliffhanger?
    • Remember that only half the class will be able to present live, and everyone should have two asynchronous commenters. You may want to use the “presenter notes” feature or otherwise share some notes if you’re planning to leave some key context or ideas off of the visual slides.

  2. Work on your project more generally, perhaps with a focus on processing – the second act in our arc of “sources, processed and presented.”

  3. Play around with StoryMaps. If you’re just curious and want to stay with today’s geographic theme, or if you see a space in your project for a scrolling multimedia visual experience, Pitt has a license that will get you in for free:
    1. Click on “Sign in”
    2. Click on “Your ArcGIS Organization’s URL”
    3. Type “pitt” in the box and click on Continue
    4. Click on “Pitt Passport Sign In”

There are tutorials to guide you in exploring the interface (15 min – work side by side with their guide and a new window); or prompt you through the process of breaking down your ideas into a focused narrative storyboard (they say 15 min, but I suspect longer would be better, or further along in the process); or rebuild a story from materials they provide you (~30 min).

NB: If you want quick placeholder content, especially for the first tutorial, I recommend lorem ipsum for text and picsum.photos for images.

Set an intention

In the shared google doc, write up to 2 sentences declaring your intentions: Given what you hope to achieve by the end of the term, and where you are right now, how would you like to use the next 30-40 minutes?

EXT: Debrief and/or Exit Note

When the end of the class is approaching, please head back into the google doc and respond to your own note from earlier:

  • How far did you get?
  • What are your new priorities for the coming week?

If time allows, we can talk about how it went.

Homework for week 09:

No new reading! Instead, prepare a 5-minute presentation on your semester-long DSAM project, and post links on the discussion forum to…

  1. Your presentation file (e.g. PowerPoint, Google Slides, Prezi, StoryMaps, slides.js, etc)
  2. Your public-facing project-in-progress (website, GH repo, etc)
Confirm your files are accessible You'll know your files are publicly accessible if you can open the links in an incognito window. Alternatively, you can share to our individual email addresses via OneDrive (right-click on the file or folder and select Share) or Google Drive (click the Share button). This is especially important for peer review.

At this stage in your iterative process, you should be able to draw on your Mindful Practice Journal to present to class on these questions:

  • What sources / objects are you working with (brief reminder), and how many do you have?
  • What have you done with or to those sources to take advantage of digital affordances? In other words, how have you processed these sources?
  • How’s it going so far? Show us (briefly) what you’ve got!
    • Note that this may include insights about your process as well as your developing product.
  • What are your next steps, or your questions for us?
NB: Bring your own dongle, if you need one.

As a reminder, everyone will post, but only half the class can present live. If you want to record yourself making the presentation, you can do so using a tool like Zoom or Panopto; share a link to the recording in your forum post.

Presentation order and peer-review partners
This person Presenting in slot Reviewed *by* And also by
Tunga n/a Namrata Amrita
Rose n/a Amrita Yixuan
John n/a Yixuan Li
Scylla n/a Li Yanni
Yuqing n/a Yanni Namrata
Yanni 1 Rose John
Namrata 2 John Scylla
Amrita 3 Scylla Yuqing
Yixuan 4 Yuqing Tunga
Li 5 Tunga Rose
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