Narrative Mapping Research Articles

Making Sense of the Seascape

This paper is based on the notion that the sea is a knowable, textured place that through senses, observations, skill, myths and narratives can be described and mapped. Anthropological research shows that stories and myths are crucial to give meaning to and make sense of the seascape. In ancient Greece, this type of information formed keystones in building narrative maps that could be passed on verbally to seafarers, including those who had not visited the area before. In this paper I intend to show that ancient Greek stories and myths connected to seas and coasts contained spatial information and elements of cognitive mapping that could have served practical purposes when it came to spatial orientation and wayfinding across the seascape.

“And I dedicate this win to…”

Arthur Bochner 1 wrote that even though he’d written about grief, he never really understood it until the death of his father. I suspect many of us recognize a truth in what he said. Often unannounced, death creeps like an unwelcome stain into our lives. I wonder how many of us are ready for it, and what narrative scripts are available to us at these times as we try to make sense and bring meaning to our loss. In sport, the path that I trod for my first occupation, the pervasiveness of the performance narrative means that following the death of a parent, an athlete is expected to continue with their sport, regardless of their pain and grief. “The show,” or that competition you trained so hard for, so the story goes, “must go on.” Within high performance sport the grief and loss experienced by well-known athletes seems also to provide an additional newsworthy opportunity for reporters and journalists to spice up their copy with stories of how “I did it for Dad.” But is winning the only way to represent or honor this relationship? And what of those athletes who never win? How do they honor their dead? Over the past twenty years, I have often drawn on my own experiences in professional sport to challenge the dominant performance narrative that frames winning as the only accepted and valued goal of the athlete. In this performance autoethnography I hope to extend my previous work by turning the spotlight on some of the ways the performance narrative frames how athletes and media alike represent grief and loss and what the father–child relationship means. My aim and purpose in this work is to contribute to the creation of counterstories and alternative narrative maps. Through creating such resources it may provide some athletes whose lives and experiences are currently disenfranchised or silenced, and I include myself in this group, a way to negotiate this difficult terrain in ways that are more authentic. In Mark Freeman’s terms, I seek to “break away” from this powerful monologue and sap its “coercive power.” 2

Experiments in Methodology: Sensory and Poetic Threads of Inquiry, Resistance, and Transformation

Undertaking a practice-led, qualitative research inquiry, I forged an alternate methodology where narrative inquiry, sensory ethnography, and ethnographically based poetry intersect and open a space “in-between.” I call these intersections between narrative approaches and experiments in ethnography “Sensory Poetic Relationship Mapping” (SPRM). I discovered that metaphorical spaces, places, gateways, sites of inquiry and “counter-factual spaces” can come into being. The process of SPRM enabled “hidden” community-based narratives to be revealed through dialogue, narrative, poetry, metaphor, and handmade relationship maps. As an act of creative resistance, this offered alternate voices to the dominant narratives communicated by interconnected institutions of power. SPRM cracked open the metaphorical landscape in which these marginalized stories had been relegated to the periphery, so they could flow. These narratives rewoven to the center unexpectedly interconnected and revealed new sites for future inquiry.

Urban Research in Comics Form: Exploring Spaces, Agency and Narrative Maps in Italian Marginalized Neighbourhoods

This paper reflects on the limits and potentialities of “comics-based research” (Kuttner et al., 2020) in marginalised urban contexts, through the interdisciplinary and collaborative perspective of an urban sociologist and a cultural geographer-cartoonist. The analysis starts from the empirical example of the comic book anthology Quartieri. Viaggio al Centro delle Periferie Italiane, which is devoted to five “peripheral” neighbourhoods in Italy and was realised through collaboration between researchers and cartoonists. The paper focuses on the way in which research activities and spatial analyses were influenced by the narrative and stylistic choices dictated by the “spatial grammar” of comics. Through reading the short comics story about the Arcella neighbourhood in Padua, we reflect on how comics allowed us to explore the role of everyday life spaces and of different spatial agencies and spatial structures in the area. Focusing on the role of maps in the narration, the paper further aims to make some relations between graphic and narrative choices in the story and spatial analysis visible. Quartieri is an empirical example that helps us to move beyond the idea of using comics to merely disseminate academic knowledge differently. Despite their prolific accessibility, indeed, comics seem to help us engaging differently with the contemporary debates around the spatial, material and affective turn.

Visualizing frictional encounters: Analyzing and representing street vendor strategies in Vietnam through narrative mapping

This paper examines the strengths and complexities of utilising narrative mapping to better understand and represent street vendors' everyday experiences as they attempt to access public spaces for their livelihoods. We draw on three case studies from urban Vietnam to compare and contrast both vendor experiences and narrative mapping potential. Focusing on stationary and itinerant vendors in the country's capital city, Hanoi, and in a rapidly growing upland tourist town, Sapa, we want to better understand the lived experiences and strategies of vendors who are often targeted by state officials for fines or bribes, as well as being demeaned for being ‘non-modern’ and ‘out of place’. We find that narrative mapping allows us to identify spatial and temporal patterns emerging from our data more easily than traditional text-based analyses, helping us to illustrate public space competition, frictions, and negotiations. Such an approach could make related research more accessible to a broad audience and support non-governmental organisations wanting to inform government officials with regards to how public spaces can be more equitably shared and utilised. More broadly, we suggest that narrative mapping can add nuance to analytical interpretations regarding marginalised populations in the Global South.

The Process of Moral Decision-Making in a Game-Based Narrative Scenario through the Experience of Future Government Workers

This article describes the results of a qualitative study that aimed at investigating moral decision-making processes of prospective government workers using a game-based tool. Three participants volunteered to participate in the research process, which included playing a short point-and-click narrative game and a focus group. Data was analyzed through thematic analysis as well as narrative maps which emphasized players’ decisions. Analysis indicated similarities among participants’ moral decision-making processes, from initial experiment and struggles with the tool to the application of personal and professional experiences to the game scenario. Additionally, levels of empathic engagement were found to be conditioned upon participants’ approaches to play. The results of this exploratory study shed light into aspects of moral decision-making with serious games and allow for the suggestion of instructional practices to raise learners’ moral self-awareness through game-based learning.

Narrative Maps

Narratives are fundamental to our perception of the world and are pervasive in all activities that involve the representation of events in time. Yet, modern online information systems do not incorporate narratives in their representation of events occurring over time. This article aims to bridge this gap, combining the theory of narrative representations with the data from modern online systems. We make three key contributions: a theory-driven computational representation of narratives, a novel extraction algorithm to obtain these representations from data, and an evaluation of our approach. In particular, given the effectiveness of visual metaphors, we employ a route map metaphor to design a narrative map representation. The narrative map representation illustrates the events and stories in the narrative as a series of landmarks and routes on the map. Each element of our representation is backed by a corresponding element from formal narrative theory, thus providing a solid theoretical background to our method. Our approach extracts the underlying graph structure of the narrative map using a novel optimization technique focused on maximizing coherence while respecting structural and coverage constraints. We showcase the effectiveness of our approach by performing a user evaluation to assess the quality of the representation, metaphor, and visualization. Evaluation results indicate that the Narrative Map representation is a powerful method to communicate complex narratives to individuals. Our findings have implications for intelligence analysts, computational journalists, and misinformation researchers.

The design and realization of the ancient city narrative map based on spatiotemporal knowledge graph

The design and realization of the ancient city narrative map based on spatiotemporal knowledge graph

As práticas organizativas de representar como ferramenta de gestão de organização-cidade: o caso da cidade administrativa de Minas Gerais

O presente estudo analisa a Cidade Administrativa de Minas Gerais (CAMG), a partir da perspectiva das práticas organizativas. Trata-se de um estudo de natureza qualitativa que coletou dados por meio de observação não participante, documentos e elementos visuais. Especificamente, os dados foram coletados visando abordar as práticas de representar evidenciadas no objeto do complexo predial da CAMG e inquirir sobre a prática organizativa de representar como uma ferramenta de gestão da organização-cidade. Foram utilizadas três estratégias de análise de dados processuais, a saber: narrativa, enquadramento temporal e mapeamentos visuais. Neste sentido, o presente estudo emprega uma estratégia analítica que permite apresentar os dados coletados e analisados por meio de um processo linear com início, meio e fim, para melhor ilustrar uma narrativa que emprega elementos visuais. Como resultado deste trabalho, verificou-se evidências de que os gestores lançam mão de diversas ferramentas no âmbito das práticas de representar que visam a manutenção de poder. Conclui-se que Administração Pública não utiliza as práticas organizativas de representar para dar significado às suas práticas, mas como uma ferramenta que oferece modos de ordenamento e controle para a gestão pública produzida.

COGNITIVE MAPPING AS A METHOD TO ASSESS PEOPLES’ ATTACHMENT TO PLACE

ABSTRACT Over the past five decades, the methodological approaches used to understand peoples’ emotional ties to place have been incredibly diverse, employing both quantitative and qualitative techniques (Lewicka 2011). In recent years more ethnographic, participatory visual methods such as cognitive (mental) mapping, narrative mapping, and psychogeography are showing considerable promise in revealing peoples’ attachment to place. This article seeks to illustrate how mental mapping and walking interviews can be used as an effective tool in exposing peoples’ deep emotional connection to place. With a focus on a student-centered business district in Manhattan, Kansas, we demonstrate that Aggieville exemplifies all three types of emotional attachment: functional, territorial, and emotional. Students are functionally attached to Aggieville because it provides nearly all their foundational needs (e.g. food, clothing, housing, employment) enabling them to achieve their life goals. Students demonstrate territorial attachment because Aggieville is a space created by students for students and the accepted activities and behavior are intended for students only. Students have also established an emotional attachment to “The Ville” because it is an important place for them to socialize and bond with others.

‘I am proud of my back’: an ethnographic study of the motivations and meanings of body modification as identity work among athletes with spinal cord injury

ABSTRACT Little is known about why disabled athletes choose to modify their bodies and the meanings that these modifications have for them. Drawing on data from a larger 4-year ethnographic study, we focus on the motivations and meanings of five athletes who had become disabled due to spinal cord injury (SCI) for tattooing their bodies in specific ways. Our analysis illuminates the following key themes as being significant in the body modification choices of those involved: re-inscribing identity, subverting the ableist stare and embodying disability pride, articulating gendered sexuality, and enabling the process of narrative mapping between pre- and post-spinal cord injury periods. In considering these themes we reveal some important contrasts between ablebodied and disabled forms of engagement with body modification practices.

Reweaving urban water‐community relations: Creative, participatory river “daylighting” and local hydrocitizenship

Framed by questions about “hydrocitizenship” in the 21st century, this co‐produced, interdisciplinary arts and humanities‐centred research explores the (re)weaving of local knowledges, experiences, perceptions, and values of water and place through the concept, process, and practice of “daylighting hidden rivers.” Located at the nexus of three theoretical frames – “participation,” “hydrocitizenship,” and “daylighting,” it engages reflexively with strong and weak “hydrocitizenship” and with paradigms of ‘daylighting.’ Working with diverse communities and organisations in South Bristol (UK), this eco‐social research project discovered community concerns and needs, and positioned itself in relation to these in co‐production. This involved older people, children, and professional stakeholders in a place‐specific, “catchment” setting, using novel arts‐led, creative, narrative mapping processes. We critically examined the value, opportunities, and tensions of this multi‐method approach to people's past, present, and future connections and relationships with their local (water) environment, their senses of self and community. Our iterative processes of seeking out “lesser heard” voices were conceived and played out around a braided cascade of “openings”: emerging, connecting, enacting, imagining, and reflecting. Thinking critically about our oblique, emergent processes, we identify 15 “top tips” concerning the creative participatory daylighting of lay knowledges and values, and “river visioning.” These can inform co‐working with communities to enable and empower citizen engagement with places and local water issues for resilient futures. Our findings contribute new understandings of “hydrocitizenship” and creative participatory “daylighting” in combination, when urban spaces are construed as “water cities,” cascading both water and narratives. Importantly, our co‐production processes with lesser heard groups also exemplify “higher‐order participation” in co‐visioning resilient futures, with all the messiness, complexity, and conflicts exposed.

Narrative Mapping: Participant-Generated Visual Methodology for Health Communication Research and Pedagogy

ABSTRACT Narrative mapping is a newly emergent form of participant-generated visual methodology. This essay differentiates narrative mapping from other visual methodologies and from other genres of mapping by examining a shared epistemological framework undergirding both the construction of narratives and the crafting of maps. The confluence of these innately human inclinations extends current methodological practices of narrative inquiry, especially in health communication. Narrative maps not only enhance sense-making abilities but they are unique communicative tools through which participants address their lived/ing experience in encounters of care and research. Recognizing both personal and political nature of healthcare, a poststructural feminist commitment further grounds this methodological framework and analysis.

Mapping stories: representing urban everyday narratives and operations

This paper proposes the idea of narrative mapping as a way to reveal how urban space operates in an everyday context. It argues that narrative mapping has the potential to capture the particularity of urban living space through interactive digital medium. In particular, this paper presents the development of Mapping Stories—a mapping representation that captures the observed everyday narratives and visualizes them through an interactive digital medium. Drawing on De Certeau’s idea of everyday spatial operation, we developed this mapping as a form of practice that spatializes narratives with its geo-referenced location. It projects the chain of the events occurring in a time–space context, which articulate the everyday narrative to reveal the particularity of urban space. The interactivity of the digital medium allows for the reading and selection of narratives within their time–space contexts instead of enforcing the totalisation of the map into a single narrative. This mapping approach acknowledges the potential of urban spaces as dynamic sites of everyday narratives and operations. It highlights the open-ended nature of urban contexts and suggests their potential for re-appropriation through the more plural and open-minded urban design practice.

Cartographies of belonging: mapping nomadic narratives of first-year students

ABSTRACT In this work, we explore first-year students’ experiences of belonging through the theoretical and methodological lens of nomadism. Specifically, we problematize conceptions of belonging subjects and spaces as bounded and static, instead taking up belongingness as a dynamic process that enfolds complex experiences and spaces. Using feminist poststructuralism, we move toward an understanding of belonging that disrupts stasis and fixity, conceptualizing belonging as requiring continual negotiation. Our analysis produces a cartography across participants, a narrative mapping of the connections, relations, and flows of belonging that parallel and disrupt static understandings of what it means to belong in higher education. This work suggests new methodological and theoretical possibilities for considering and understanding narratives of belonging in the nebulous, multiplicitous, and shifting places and spaces of higher education institutions.

What evidence exists for landbird species-environment relationships in eastern temperate and boreal forests of North America? A systematic map protocol

BackgroundEastern temperate and boreal forests of North America contain declining populations of several migratory bird species. Breeding season habitat loss and degradation, and lack of structural complexity, have been proposed as potential drivers of declines. Forest management has moved toward balancing multiple age classes to support sustainable harvest and meet the needs of wildlife associated with different forest types, structural conditions, and landscape configurations. Extensive research on forest bird species-environment relationships has occurred in direct reference to, and outside of, this management context. In this systematic map, we propose to answer the review question: what evidence exists for bird species-environment relationships in eastern temperate and boreal forests of North America? The map will outline the available science for developing spatially-explicit forest management plans to benefit multiple bird species at regional scales. A global review recently found little evidence to support either positive or negative effects of systematic conservation planning on real-world management systems. This result was driven by the widespread absence of measureable criteria to evaluate plan performance and pervasive disconnects between conservation planners and management program evaluators. Successful evaluation of forest management requires, at minimum, the specification of metrics that clearly relate vegetation attributes (predictors) to bird-related outcomes (responses). This systematic map should aid in the selection of evaluation metrics that can be used across the entire planning-implementation-evaluation cycle to: (1) characterize baseline conditions, (2) specify target conditions, (3) and evaluate progress toward achieving targets.MethodsThis protocol describes methods to search for, identify, screen, and extract meta-data from primary research studies that report on bird species-environment relationships in eastern temperate and boreal forests of North America. Searches will be conducted using bibliographic databases and grey literature sources suggested by a technical oversight team comprised of practicing foresters and land managers. Inclusion and exclusion criteria will be specified to identify articles containing relevant information for meta-data extraction. Meta-data will be extracted from all eligible studies, summarized in a narrative systematic map report, and made available online as a searchable geodatabase.

Mapped stories: Cartography, history, and the representation of time in space

AbstractAs novels can be mapped, maps in return can be shown to have a narrative dimension. Maps referring to historical events, for instance those of the invasion of the USSR in June 1941, obviously tell a story. Recounted through graphic means, that story has specific aspects in the areas of order, duration, frequency, authorship, and perspective. Yet, similar in this respect to the descriptions that historians provide, narrative maps are neither neutral, nor whole. Grounded in selection, they necessarily develop an argument, are incomplete, and rely on symbols that are both conventional and arbitrary.

Narrative mapping as cognitive activity and as active participation in storyworlds

AbstractEver the devil’s advocate, Richard Walsh argues in a 2017 article that drawing maps based on narrative fiction is a meaningless activity, because (1) narrative cognition is temporal and not spatial; (2) narrative fiction does not project worlds in any experiential sense of the term (i. e. worlds as immersive environments) but only “worlds” as textual constructs, as products ofécriture; and (3) reading should lead to meaningful interpretations, and inferences should be limited by a principle of relevance. His example of futile map-making is the floor plan which is included in the English editions of Alain Robbe-Grillet’sLa Jalousiebut is absent from the original French edition. In this article, I argue that narrative cognition is not a specialized ability distinct from the forms of cognition that we use in practical life, but rather, the product of these abilities; and I defend the validity of narrative mapping as way to engage the imagination with – yes – a storyworld. This is not to say that narrative understandingrequiresthe drawing or mental contemplation of a comprehensive representation of the storyworld; usually the formation of partial mental maps is sufficient to follow the plot. But for some readers (among them Nabokov) drawing graphic maps is a way to engage the imagination with the storyworld and to enhance comprehension. This map-making activity can go far beyond making sense of the text and become an autonomous activity comparable to writing fan fiction. To support this view, I invoke the numerous maps found on the Internet for narratives ranging from Proust’sA la recherche du temps perduto Tolkien’sLord of the Rings. While the strictly “textualist” aesthetics of orthodox literary theory would regard these maps as frivolous, a world-oriented approach regards the urge to map and diagram as a legitimate form of active participation in narrative, because, while you can imagine too little to appreciate these texts, you cannot imagine too much.

Third world sovereignty, indigenous sovereignty, and food sovereignty: living with sovereignty despite the map

ABSTRACTSovereignty remains a theoretically unclear and politically problematic concept. I find some promise, however, in a practice of sovereignty that operates in spite of lines on a map. My study draws from a mix of personal narrative, historical study, doctrinal analysis, and institutional mapping. I examine sovereignty with one foot in Beirut and the other in Bandung; from this postcolonial and transnational setting, I run into a political and conceptual dead-end. I therefore look to two cases that I argue exemplify a practice of sovereignty worth supporting and replicating. The Inuit technique of geographical reframing through international doctrine and institutions is innovative and potentially something others can try. The food sovereignty movement highlights that power stems from social organising and change will not come from theoretical elegance. What these struggles confirm is that any understanding of change in international law must address the question of solidarity as a central concern.

Narrative mapping and motivation in Adiga’s The White Tiger

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) has been applied to several disciplines except literary analysis. This paper interprets Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) through this lens. This application aims at investigating the pros and cons of SDT for literary interpretation. The close reading of the novel is done through Altman’s narrative mapping. SDT scrutinizes Balram’s, the protagonist’s, actions through motivational and behavioral justifications, and narrative mapping opens enough space to examine his changes from a single character/action unit to other ones. Attending to both personal and public dimensions of Balram’s life, SDT provides psychological and scientific justifications for his behavior and reveals how his motivations are influenced by cultural forces. The application of SDT and narrative mapping shows both are conducive to a better appreciation of the novel. However, the aesthetic and rhetoric motivations of Balram’s linguistic behavior remain unaddressed by both SDT and narrative mapping.