3D Literary Worlds

Do you ever get sucked into a book and feel like every time that you go back to it, you're entering another world? You can be doing something mundane like riding a bus, for example, and then open a book and get transported into some other universe. I always look forward to those moments and feel sad when the book is over, like I just got excommunicated from a secret place.

Well, Stepping into Literature is a conference that explores how this experience can be extended through virtual worlds. Virtual Worlds can allow the reader to interact with the place and the characters beyond the book's end. On one hand, I prefer to see the story that I read in my own imagination. On the other hand, it seems like an intriguing idea to enter a collective imagination of sorts.

Here's a blurb:
The "Stepping into Literature" Conference will take place on August 4th, 2008 and again on August 6th. During this conference, we will talk about and actually visit some of the best and most creative work being done in promoting a love of literature in a virtual world environment. It will be held entirely in the virtual world of Second Life. read more here...

Another interesting project is led by Bryan Carter, an assistant professor of literature at Central Missouri State University. He specializes in African American literature of the 20 th Century with a primary focus on the Harlem Renaissance. Carter has been working on developing Virtual Harlem in Second Life.

Experiments with Google MyMaps

During the summer term, I was teaching a course called Urban Visual Anthropology. The students and I studied the cities of Olympia and Lacey. We focused on specific expressions of urban culture (such as nature, graffiti, religion, signage, etc.) and social spaces (street corners, aquifer, coffee shops, parks etc.). Using photography as a research tool, we then experimented with creating visual essays in Flickr and mapped them into Google MyMaps.

Flickr has its own map, but Google Maps are easier to access and also the map can be viewed in Google Earth so I decided that we should map the projects onto Google instead of Flickr map. Flickr provided a great way to 1. organize, 2. annotate and 3. present the data. We were able to arrange the images into categories through sets and by tagging. This was an important part of data analysis as we began to make sense of the images that we've collected. Then we added titles and descriptions to each image. The description included a discussion that related to the course readings and was analytical. Finally, students created slide shows of their visual essays and presented them in class. The last step was to map the visual essays into Google MyMaps, for public scholarship.

Click on the map to see how it worked out. Students selected one favorite image from their visual esay and mapped it into the location where they took the photograph. They also added a link to the visual essays that they created in Flickr. Click on the individual icons on the map to see examples of their projects.