Project description:

For my project, I wanted to create a map depicting a story of a particular copy of the book that was published in the late 1840s in Imperial Russia. That copy is a unique one in the sense that it has stamps and inscriptions of previous owners and institutions this copy was part of. Thanks to these stamps and inscriptions, it was possible to recreate, in part, the way the copy travel through the times, the countries, and the people and institutions. It should be also pointed out that this story has blank spots–it’s unclear who owned the copy at a certain point, and this is something that still could be researched and analyzed.

Platform:

I decided to choose Palladio as a tool to illustrate the book’s itinerary. First of all, I jotted down all the places that were known to me–two cities in what now Russian Federation is (back then, it was Imperial Russia), one city in what is now Ukraine (back then, it was the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and two cities in the United States (both in New York state). The first city in Russia is the city the book was printed in; the other city in Russia is a place where one of the owners of the copy lived; the third city on the map is a city where a library received this copy as a donation; the fourth town in the US in a place where this book was; and the fifth, the city it ended up in. 

I found the exact geographical locations of these places and included latitude and longitude the way it was recommended. For that, I used an Excel spreadsheet. I followed the guidelines the tool has about datasets and it took me lots of time to finally come up with a dataset that the tool would accept and turn it into a map. Although I prepared the dataset initially in a way it was recommended in their guidelines, it did not work and that was really confusing.

Outcome:

The map I came up with could have been more clear: for example, it could have mentioned the approximate dates (when known) the copy “spent,” so to say, in a certain place. It could also show the trajectory of its itinerary: how did it move from what place and when. To make it even more interactive, it could have included the images of the institutions which had or have the copy in their possession. To better present this information, a different tool could have been used. 

A different avenue:

I would probably want to have a map or a set of maps that could clearly illustrate the itinerary of that copy, on the one hand. At the same time, on the other hand, I would want these visualizations to work in a way that could be treated as illustrations to a write-up or essay about this story. This means, the data set may need more data to be found, analyzed, and included, so it could be reproduced well enough on the visuals.