I recently posted some experiments in creating geographic landscapes over the space of novels such as “The Great Gatsby” and “Pride and Prejudice”. Like any maps, these are potentially spaces upon which people can overlay shared commentaries, links, histories, or interesting routes and connections.
The game changes somewhat if the landscape is built from a play, such as, for example, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. In the case of theatre, we not only have the original written work, but also specific embodied performances. One can imagine a geographic landscape of the play as a map into a performance, and as a space for people to discuss aspects of that performance (or even from which to compare different productions).
I have a sense that this sort of shared landscape can have a richness that goes beyond what we can do with novels, since the liveness of theatrical performance adds depth and dimension to the discussion. It would be interesting to see whether we could apply an adaptation of my narrative geography to the problem of building a community of thought and commentary around an particular performance of a play.
We could also do the same with movies, yet somehow I find theatre more appealing for this process, because the connection is so much stronger and more essential between the original sequence of words in the script and the resulting performance.
I like that you call it a landscape, because I think your implementation – and this idea – lends itself to depth, and a representation via topological cues (colours, shading, contour lines, etc) that we recognize from maps.
Akin to the white for mountain tops and dark green for valleys, you could add colours that indicate the amount of discussion in a particular region of the play (or book, for that matter), among a group of critics (imagine adding them, via a citation selection mechanism) or just registered users to a site.
We have other visual metaphors for intensity – think of the “heat map” approach – and these might even be more striking, but I like the topological because I imagine a view of the novel not from the top but from an angle, revealing the peaks and valleys of focus and attention. Might be just the thing for picking a dissertation topic: I’ll focus on THAT valley, and avoid THOSE hills!
I think you could do this, not just with long-established documents, like plays and novels, but also with emerging documents, such as wikipedia entries or popular and discussion heavy blogs, such as Techdirt.
Another branch – although I know you cautioned me about adding filigree to an elegant design – might be to map a corpus of documents rather than a single one. All of Jane Austen’s books, for example. Once a hot spot (or cold corner) had been identified, the viewer could descend a level, to the book in question.
Miss you here at the MDM. The students were ecstatic. Come back soon.
…r