Mapping Historical Texts in the Classroom: The Anatolian Travelers Project
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14714/CP93.1488Abstract
The process of mapping provides an active approach for students to engage with landscapes of the past. As part of a graduate-level class called Spatial Analysis of the Past, students were given an assignment to create online maps of nineteenth-century travelers’ accounts about western Anatolia (Turkey). Travelers often record their experiences of journeying through foreign landscapes. Although usually written from the perspective of an outsider, these first-hand accounts can serve as valuable primary source documents for geographical information about these regions. The participation of students in mapping these accounts can prompt deep reflection in the classroom regarding the subjectivity of spatial representations and understandings. This class assignment served as the initial step in a larger research undertaking called the Anatolian Travelers Project, an ongoing, open access initiative. This project attempts to collect, organize, and visualize regional travelers’ accounts through online mapping, to improve our understanding of how people interacted with this landscape and its inhabitants. The project records and compares, among other things, the travelers’ modes of transportation, the routes they chose, their observations about the land and people, and what they felt was worth recording and publishing. Here, we reflect on the use of web mapping as a pedagogical method in teaching the past by reporting on the results of our classroom experimentations. Specifically, we focus on four learning goals: the integration of historical and archaeological methods, an increase in digital literacy among humanities students, experimentation with visualization decisions, and an investigation of landscape and spatial perspectives. Our experiences in the classroom will help inform our future implementations of online mapping as a teaching tool. In terms of technology, we utilized the Neatline plugin to Omeka for mapping, though we consider infrastructure ultimately interchangeable.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication, with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).