Well it’s certainly good to be back at that Digital Humanities game, even though I don’t really know what to do with all these people in library. Not even two weeks in and I got my first mission: to find a digital mapping tool that’s easier than CartoDB for a Spanish 306 class. Finding a mapping tool that’s more user friendly than CartoDB is an easy feat, but deciding which tool to use is difficult. I already had a list of mapping tools that I had experience with StoryMapJS, Google TourBuilder, ZeeMaps, and a couple of other minor ones that I had looked into while trying to put together my own map over the summer. ZeeMaps and TourBuilder are extremely user friendly but lack the narrative and sophistication of StoryMapJS, and StoryMapJS lacks a lot of mapping features that ZeeMaps and TourBuilder have. Taking this knowledge, I decided to feature out to Digital Humanities Forums and sources to find new mapping tools that would hopefully give me what I was looking for.
At first I tried to work with Neatline, a mapping plugin for Omeka. It’s a very intensive mapping tool with an emphasis on the cartography side rather than a narrative, like CartoDB but slightly more user friendly. If I have time I would like to do more with NeatLine, but it takes lots of time and a lot more patience. And then I found it. The love of my life, my pride and joy: Fabula Maps.
Fabula Maps has the narrative and sophistication of StoryMapJS but with more mapping features like animated markers, base maps, and the option of multiple pathways. Even better, it’s extremely user friendly. Even better, it’s embeddable. And the best is that the markers are animated!! So I was super excited to show this to the professor and she seemed very interested by it, so my job right now is to test the limits of Fabula Maps, like how many markers and how much media I can put in before it crashes, if it crashes. I think that Fabula Maps is a great in class digital tool because it has great user experience and very distracting features which can easily capture student attention.
Along with testing Fabula Maps for Spanish 306, I’m seeing if Fabula Maps would be more suited to my needs than StoryMapJS in terms of mapping out my cadets. While it’s not exactly continuing my research I think it’s important to improve upon what I already have, especially if there is a medium that is more suited to my project.
Speaking of the continuation of my project, the service records have been set back a bit seeing as there was a problem with transferring my files onto my new laptop, so I don’t have any of my research files or records from War of the Rebellion, except for the indexes that I have written in my notebook. It’s a loss of research but with my indexes, I don’t have to start from scratch. I hope to have my records done by Bucknell, which I am super excited for by the way. I think the entire cohort is excited. Then we can reunite with our Lafayette counterparts, admittedly not all of them, but enough to balance out the Digtal Scholar Schuyler Sisters.
-Julia
Can’t wait to hear if the Spanish students love Fabula as much as you do. Sell it!