Atlascine: Navigating between and within Stories with Maps (J1A2)

Maximum number of participants: 25

While there is now a large range of online mapping tools dedicated to telling stories with maps, there are very few applications fully dedicated to map the spatial structure of stories. Among those is Atlascine. Atlascine is a free opensource software developed by the Geomedia lab at Concordia University (http://geomedialab.org/atlascine.html) in collaboration with the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Center at Carleton University (Ottawa). Originally designed to map and study the geography of cinematographic narratives, Atlascine is now dedicated to address the methodological and ontological challenges of defining, circumscribing and characterizing places in stories. Since 2013, it has been used in collaboration with the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) at Concordia University to map different corpus of stories, including the life stories of exiles from Rwanda (see https://rs-atlascine.concordia.ca/rwanda/index.html).

The enhanced version of Atlascine (4.0) aims to enable full interaction between the digital texts, the audio/video files and the maps. With this new version of the platform, researchers in many disciplines can use the map not only as a way to visually synthesize large volumes of data and to identify new patterns and structures in these stories, but also to use the map to navigate within the stories, to find specific information and similarities between stories and between places.

In this workshop, participants will be guided through the process of using Atlascine 4.0 to map stories. They will learn how to create an Atlascine project, how to tag a story, how to map it, how to compare different stories and how to navigate between them through common themes and places. The workshop will end with a guided discussion on the ethical, methodological and technological challenges of mapping stories. Participants will go away with new insight into the complexity of mapping stories, as well as with some practical solutions offered by Atlascine.