Shatian Wang and I will be working on a project stemming from my senior thesis examining two queer women communities in contemporary urban China. At hand we have ethnographic data (in-depth, personal interviews) of twelve queer women across the class strata living in two major metropoles, Shanghai and Shenzhen, PRC.
At the moment, we conceptualize a website comprising of visual representations of every narrator’s life framed through their migration (within and outside of China) patterns, educational and work paths as well as personal voices and experiences. For each interlocutor’s story, we hope to contextualize their personal narrative through a historical lens by means of researching archives of local history of gender and sexuality, which will be done mainly through overviewing academic sources. We would like to utilize various GIS tools to help visualize and present our data (both contemporary ethnography and historical sources illustrated in academic literature) and we will store our data in a database format. The analysis of primary data is mostly accomplished as I have already transcribed and translated interviews needed for the project. The next concrete step we would need to take is to search through academic literature for history of each city/town that our interviewees have been in with special regards to gender and sexuality. As we mentioned before, our way of presentation will be an integration of mapping and personal narratives. In other words, we wish to present an interactive map through which personal narratives will be told and explored.
Our schedule for execution is as following–
Week 6
- Prepare personal narratives extrapolated from interviews
- Research for city histories
Week 7
- Learn the GIS/web development tools we will be using to build our website
Week 8
- Finish building the framework of our website
Week 9
- Complete website with personal stories and geographical markers for our project
Week 10
- Presentation and final touch
To model our DH project, we have found inspiration from two different existing project presented as following, both of which will be beneficial in helping us formulate our own template for presentation.
Hi Team (not sure what to call this group, Queer Communities?),
This sounds like a fascinating project and I love that it is an outgrowth of your own research but presented in a dynamic, interactive way. I would highly recommend you use ESRI’s StoryMaps to create your narrative, and the Cascade template is the one most similar to the storytelling map you link to as an example.
As I mentioned in class, you’ll want to make sure you’ve secured permission, in writing, from your interviewee’s to make their material public on the web before you include them, but this should be fascinating. How are you going to collect the data for city histories? Will you map specific places within each city, or routes women traveled, or will you have just a small scale map of the whole region of China?
I’m very intrigued to see what you come up with and happy to help in any way I can.