The Experience of Movement: Visualization of a Travelogue [Tom]

User Notes

Welcome to my map! It is a spatial visualization of a travelogue, Journal of a Lady of Quality, which follows Lowland Scotswoman Janet Schaw’s journey from Scotland to the West Indies and then to North Carolina in 1774 and 1775. My story map guides the viewer through Schaw’s journey in words (on the left side) and spatially (through the map on the left side, which changes as you move through the story). To navigate the story map, just scroll through at your own pace and enjoy! A pop-up with some information will occur at each station, and if that obstructs your view of the map, feel free to close it after reading. The pop-up includes information on content type, Schaw’s tone when writing from this area, and several other bits of information you might find interesting.

After the story map reaches the conclusion of Schaw’s journal, I provide a link to the more open-ended form of my map. Here you will be able to toggle on and off additional layers not included in the story map, which measure hot spots and occurrences of different tones and content types (scaled by number of pages written) as well as locations of Schaw's mention of Scottish Highlanders. You will also be able to toggle the visited-mentioned connecting lines you will see in the story map. Please explore this map for a little bit to investigate spatial patterns of emotion and content that occur throughout Schaw’s journey. I suggest looking at several different layers at once to investigate their relationship, as well as zooming in to Carolina, Antigua or the British Isles instead of just viewing the map in its initial broad position.

Enjoy!

Follow this link to access my story map: The Experience of Movement: Visualization of a Travelogue

For the free-form base map, click here: Base Map. This link is also at the end of the story map, and I suggest you go through the story map first.

Statement of Significance

The topic my map aims to explore is the experience of Scottish people in the New World (specifically the Carolinas) in the 1770s. The travelogue I derived the map from, Journal of a Lady of Quality, is written by a well-off, Lowland Scotswoman who visits the New World in 1774. The aim of my map is to allow users to learn something about not only the spatial aspects of Janet Schaw’s experience, but the experience of permanent migrants, Highlanders and other actors involved in Scottish migration and the American Revolution. It also allows the viewer to generate more spatial questions that can further their understanding of the topic.

For an example about the power of spatial question generation for understanding the topic, consider the following screenshot from my story map:

The black dots are locations Schaw visited in North Carolina. They are clustered along the main branch of the Cape Fear River and none of them are far from the coast. The distribution of these dots begs the question: why was Schaw’s movement confined to such a small space? By 1774, there were New World settlements much further from the coast than these. Given that Schaw comes from a privileged background (her somewhat snobby mindset is reflected in her writing), what does her lack of travel to the inland tell us about that region? Because Schaw does not mention her encounters with anyone of Highland origin during her time in North Carolina, it is a strong possibility that many Highland migrants to the Carolinas settled further inland than their Lowland counterparts. This could be confirmed with further research. My map enables learning beyond the takeaways of the journal text, as in this example.

Here is another example about what we can learn from my quantifications of tone and content in Schaw’s travelogue. Consider the following screenshot from my interactive map:

The red dots mark areas where Schaw’s journal features political content, and the transparent, blue heat maps mark hot spots where Schaw writes in a fearful tone. The map shows the strong relationship between political writing and fearful tone in North Carolina around the beginning of the American Revolution. Zooming in further would allow the user to understand the more specific spatialities of fear in the (aptly named) Cape Fear region, and how the spaces Schaw moves through relate to her emotional state. Following the story map, the viewer can learn how some of her movements are inspired by fear while some of the other locations she spends time in are characterized by political happenings which often inspired fear. In sum, my “Tone” and “Content” map layers allow the viewer to investigate how spatiality plays a role in relationships such as this one and gives viewers a better feel for Schaw’s experience.