While learning through the lens of Digital Arts and Humanities, ArcGIS and Mapping became one of my favorite tools to explore and visualize knowledge in relation to its geographical and therefore cultural context. It adds a lot of nuance in understanding and building a story. As a performer, storytelling is also one of my areas of interest. Some projects in this section simply seek to highlight the ways in which I have engaged with narrative building and performance.
Exploring the Weitz Center of Creativity
Skills Learned: ArcGIS Online, Georeferencing and Story Mapping, Data Collection, Sorting & Visualization
Goal: This project aimed at using mapping to create a story of the events that took place in our Center of Creativity over a term, couched in a larger narrative of the Center itself. This aimed at making the building and its events not just to the Campus, but also the Northfield Community at large.
Process: We georeferenced all the floorplans of the Weitz onto a map of Carleton and then used that as a BaseMap to create a time-tracked visualization of all the events that took place on the different floors of the building over the span of a Carleton term. We situated this BaseMap of the Weitz in a StoryMap that provided more details and pictures of the Weitz itself and some of the events that took place over the term.
Additionally, we created other visualizations and graphs using Flourish.io about the data we collected for the above project. We used the Carleton Arts Events Calendar to gather our data, and Google Sheets to sort through and organize the data.
Visualizing the Charles W Cushman Photograph Collection
Skills Learned: ArcGIS Online, Georeferencing and Story Mapping, Data Collection, Sorting & Visualization
Goal: Mapping the locations of a subsection of this large Photograph collection to create a visual infographic of the places explored by the collection.
Process: For this project, I downloaded the Charles W Cushman Photograph Collection dataset and focused on the subsection of the photographs that were documented in the year 1960 in the United States. Once I organized the data to fit into this subsection, I sorted them by their three categories: aerial photographs, architectural photographs, or cityscape photographs. Then I geolocated this sorted data using ArcGIS and categorized the geolocated symbols by the aforementioned categories and the date they were archived, The earlier the photograph was archived, the smaller its symbol was in size to showcase this information.
I also used Flourish to highlight particular relationships between the data points. For example, I created a stacked bar graph to show the relationship between the category of the photographs and the number of photographs present in that category.
Mapping Japan
Skills Learned: Omeka S, Collecting and Archiving Metadata
Goal: Through my position as a Digital Humanities Associate at Carleton, help the library in creating a digital archive of the Japanese Maps in our collection and help create materials for a course on Mapping Japan for the Spring term of 2025.
Process: We created metadata fo the 13 Japanese Maps in the Carleton Collection that had been digitized. We used Omeka S to do so. We also made instructional documentation on how to create items, add metadata and embed the digitized maps into Omeka S. This documentation was made with the intention of being accessible to the students who will take the Mapping Japan course that Carleton will offer in the Spring term of 2025. The Mapping Japan site itself is also a contribution to the efforts of creating more awareness about the important histories of the captured maps in Carleton's possessions from the time of WW2. The maps and the website link the overlapping stories of US and Carleton histories.
Bollywood Nation
Skills Learned: Media Production, Screenwriting, Directing, Video Recording, Video Editing
Goal: For ENGL 245: Bollywood Nation, we wrote, directed, acted in, and edited a 10 minute long Bollywood Movie that was a culmination of all the tropes and themes we learned by watching the Bollywood Movies assigned to us through the term.
Process: I wrote the script in Hindi, and a translation of it in English for the subtitles.
It was a fun collaborative experience to teach Hindi to my fellow cast members and spend days together editing our clips and picking Bollywood sounds that would form the soundtrack of our movie. Using a different language and cultural context to tell a story set in Northfield, MN was a new way of using digital tools to play with our sense of place.
Creating an Indian Songline
Skills Learned: Interdisciplinary Research, Digital Storytelling, Georeferencing and StoryMapping, Digital Journaling
Goal: Inspired by Australian Aboriginal Songlines, create a digital StoryMap of an Indian Songline that maps my familial histories intertwined with the local histories in various places in West Bengal, India.
Process: This is still an ongoing project in which I will make use of the different pictures and narratival histories I have collected and journaled about, georefernece and map them onto an ArcGIS StoryMap that will narrate their significane and add a digital voiceover to include the element of audio and song.