Geomedia and the Geoweb is a course conceived at Concordia University by Sébastien Caquard and co-taught with members of the Geomedia Lab. The course introduces students to both numeric tools that have emerged in the context of the Geoweb and alternative mapping practices (craft-based, performance art, etc). Each class is associated with a lab where students experiment with different mapping tools (online and offline) to create their own maps and evaluate whether it is serving their intended goal. By the end of the course, the students acquire the geovisualization skills necessary to design meaningful maps. Here are some examples of student mapping projects from the Fall 2021 academic term.
"My name is Jonathan Diamantstein. I am an undergraduate student at Concordia University studying human environment and geospatial technologies. In the fall of 2021, I had the opportunity to take GEOG 466. For my final project for the course, I chose to map the life story interview of my Bubbe, Pepi Zuckerbrodt. My Bubbe (grandmother in Yiddish) was recorded by the USC Shoah Foundation in seven thirty-minute videos talking about her life as a Jewish person before, during, and after the holocaust. This story is significant to me because she had never openly talked about her experiences. I had wanted to use Atlascine because I was fortunate enough to have both video and audio portions of her life story. The process of coding and creating a transcript was a very powerful part of the mapping process. Throughout the use of Atlascine, I chose a close reading approach to georeference themes of danger and or discrimination, family, value transferring, perseverance, violence, and adolescent perspective. The transcript, now coded into these themes through Atlascine, geolocated and visualized her experiences. For the first time, I could see my grandmothers’ thematic experiences and the incredible family narrative that I never knew existed. Reflecting on the past and bringing it to life unlocked the nuance of her story. I learned that Atlascine is an incredibly powerful tool that enables you to look at the finer details, georeferencing them and ultimately communicating and transmitting memory. Visualizing how words and emotion merge spatial and thematic aspects of stories is incredibly rich and informative. This project is very meaningful to me. The level of detail and how the life story interview captured my grandmother allows me to learn about her even though she has passed away. I hope to map her whole life story and other life story interviews from holocaust survivors."
"For the final project, I chose to map the stories of the artists in the documentary Palestine Underground. This documentary was released in 2018 by Boiler Room, which hosts music events internationally and submits footage to YouTube. Although not ordinarily political, the organization was able to capture the lived realities of artists in Palestine who overcome many barriers enforced by the state of Israel. Israel is referred to as Occupied Palestine by the artists, which is why I use this term in my maps. The resilience that the artists, Sama, JAZAR Crew, Muqata’a and ODDZ show to an ongoing regime of persecution demonstrate power and strength. Their music brings communities together despite the restrictions they face across the territories they live in. Representing this through maps allows the viewer to explore the spaces these artists must navigate daily and the spaces they have created to connect and exchange despite the Israeli government’s constraints. The inductive visualization approach was the most challenging for me because I wanted to develop something that represented the complex unification process of two communities through music. Drawing inspiration from the artist, Arianne Littman, I chose the base map as a deconstructed and collaged map of Occupied Palestine and Palestine. In this way, the artists’ wishes to erase borders, as expressed in the documentary, are physically reproduced by destroying them on the map. Next, I created a map that resembles DJ equipment and incorporated quotes from the artists on the records. I also added the record sleeve with a working legend explaining the map briefly. Lastly, I included the ability to spin the record to make it easier for the viewer to read the quotes on each. Overall, the final project helped me understand that stories following multiple people and different timelines are capable of being mapped with the right platform. I also learned that creating a map from an inductive visualization approach must carefully consider the intention of the story and of the characters within them."