Thu, 14 Oct 2004 [Geowanking] Waypoints are in a narrative, or a narrative is in the Waypoints?

So I am interested in 'geospatially enabled narrative.' Basically stories with a geospatial component. This might be as simple as 'we drove down to Santa Rosalia to go fishing.' Or more complex, with odd convuluted ideas of sequence and space. A story that derives its organizing metaphors from waypoints will be fundamentally different from one that derives from track logs.

In this context 'Waypoint' means a point, while 'track log' means an ordered sequence of points. Either one could have additional data associated with each point.

One idea would be to put bits of narrative within waypoints, and then allow a person to draw an arbitrary line across a map and 'play' the story by assembling the sequence of waypoints that are nearest to the line at each point.

I could see this is a way of exploring diaries of trips. Where each entry is tied to a place, or a waypoint. Depending on how you drew the line you could get back a narrative or diary that mixed different trips or different eras.

Drawing a line through from East to West towards the bottom of Wyoming would, based on my personal stories and resources, generate a narrative mixing several of my trips in the area with the Oregon Trail diary of a journey from 1852 that my Great Great Great Grandfather was on.

Using track logs of actual trips, or proposed trips, would come up with comments and notes and such from trips and stories past, but mixed up and presented in the order that you will experience those locations.

If you travel the Oregon Trail from West to East you are 'breaking' the historic model, at every step you are ahead of where they were. But if that is what you are doing, then you may want to read narratives that reflect your experience.

That whole model reflect the idea that the stories, or diary entries, are stored 'in' the waypoints. If we think of GPX files, where waypoints are in XML tags, we get something like:

<wpt lat="41.311340" lon="-105.584107">
  <name>LARAME<name>  
  <desc>Fort Laramie<desc>
  <cmt>Fort Laramie was created in 18xx to protect emmigrants 
and settlers and to serve as a ...(narrative deleted)<cmt>
<wpt>

But then it gets a bit ugly...or at least, the data modeling gets messy. What about narrative like 'we passed by Chimney Rock and Scott's Bluff and then camped acrossfrom Fort Laramie the next day.'

I get the issue that a waypoint can contain zero or more 'stories,' but a 'story' can contain zero or more waypoints. But, heck, that is okay...

Anyway, that is my thought of the day. Cheers, Rich _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list Geowanking@lists.burri.to http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking