Science Fiction

Digital Project 5: Organizing Snow Crash

Complete TimeMapper or Kumu network by H 12/5

Complete essay by M 12/09

Our last project builds on the experience you have gained in this course with organizing information from our readings to plot informational graphics that reveal patterns. It involves choosing a visualization technology we have already used in this class, either TimeMapper or Kumu.

Choose a topic from the list below on which to organize an informational graphic for Snow Crash. You may use either TimeMapper or Kumu to organize your ideas.

Option 1: TimeMapper topic:

Create a Google Sheet to be readable by TimeMapper for this option. Identify between 15 and 20 technologies represented in Snow Crash that are or have been realized in our world. Organize your TimeMapper to display whether these technologies

• are ancient technologies

• are recognizably derived from 20th-century technologies (e.g. have origins in the decades preceding the publication of Snow Crash)

• predict the future and anticipate technologies we have today.

Your TimeMap should represent some combination of all three of these, regardless of how you choose to develop your essay. Plot your TimeMapper to represent the place and time period or year in the real world associated with the invention of the technologies you have chosen. The TimeMapper needs to include links to relevant resources and should reference passages in the novel that feature each technology you choose to represent.

Drafting the essay:

Note that Snow Crash was first published in 1993. Your essay may choose primarily to look backward from 1993 at the way Snow Crash adapts past technology, or look forward from 1993 at the extent to which this novel anticipated the future, or you could do some of each. Here are some options (but you may choose your own direction):

• You might choose to concentrate on a particular kind of technology significant in the novel from before 1993 (such as, say, weaponry), and consider what commentary Stephenson might be making about its survival among futuristic technologies. What is the role of past technology to this novel?
• Or you might choose to concentrate on technologies we see being realized in our time? How effective Snow Crash was in 1993 in predicting or perhaps guiding future technological innovations? Or how differently are we realizing some of these technologies?
• What does the development of technology in this novel tell us about consumer desires and cultural priorities in the world of Snow Crash? In what ways does it expand individual capacities, and in what ways does it control, limit people, or control them in mass and crowds? Do you find that technology is more liberating or controlling in Snow Crash? And how might this compare with technology of our world?
• You could choose to concentrate your essay on a particular subset of technologies that you find particularly important to address as they reflect on issues in our moment.

Provide links to your Google Sheet and TimeMapper plot in your essay. Your essay should probably be three to five double-spaced pages long, or between 800 and 1500 words.

Kumu Concept Map topics:

Snow Crash can dazzle the reader with a great variety of places, technologies, and social structures. Work on building a concept map using Kumu to systematically organize some of this complexity we read in Snow Crash. Choose a topic on which to organize your concept map. Here are some options:

• How much does material technology create a character? Build a network associating particular characters in the novel with the technologies and tech skills that build, enhance, and/or distinguish them from other characters. And consider what technologies and tech skills are shared by characters in this novel. What do people need machines to do for them personally?

• Make a network map of the significant franchulates, nations, and zones (social organizations) which we see engaged in conflict or alliance in this novel. Organize these according to a set of values each represents. For example, which of these represents a mixing of ethnicities and which represent racist or isolationist attitudes?
  • What main characters are associated with specific social organizations?
  • What technologies are associated with each of these social organizations?
  • Which social organizations support L. Bob Rife’s operations and which do not? Which seem neutral?
• How much does the fate of the Real World hinge on the Metaverse in this novel?
  • Identify characters, locations, and organizations that exist in both the Real World and the Metaverse, as well as characters, locations, and organizations that exist in only one place or the other.
  • Identify technologies that are shown to have parallels in the real world and the metaverse, and map out what characters are using them.
  • Concentrate on specific technologies in Reality and the Metaverse associated with the key conflicts of this novel over language and control of human and computer systems. Make a concept map that represents how these specific technologies are involved in freedom or control of people and machines.

As with Digital Project 4, your network should be developed from Elements with a coherently organized set of Types and Tags, and you should provide images and descriptions for at least the most important nodes. Try to keep things simple and organized. You do not have to plot out every kind of relationship imaginable. Instead, choose to follow specific patterns and try to do so completely by finding everything of a kind. (If you are going to comment on character’s connected to stage objects, look at all the stage directions as well as dialogue and make sure you are capturing every object as it changes hands.)

Choose the words you use for the Type and Tags columns with care to help you make an easily readable visualization. It’s best if the categorical words you apply for Types and Tags are reusable at least once. Run the Social Network Analysis function in Kumu to generate metrics to use in sizing your nodes and weighting your connections.

Your network should include:

• 15 to 20 distinct elements,
• at least two different Types of elements (using the Type column)
• no more than four distinct Types.

You may establish connections in any way you wish. Connections can be made according to shared tags and/or roles (using the Tag or Role column), and/or using the Connections tab, which permits you to form particular connections between elements. Use the network analyzer to supply network statistics to give you different sizes of nodes and to help organize your plot. Experiment with the Social Network Analysis function to give you metrics that help size your nodes, give weight to your connections, and organize the final graphs you choose to submit and write about for this assignment.

Drafting the essay:

Begin the writing process by thinking about the decisions you made in graphing. Remember that any visualization is going to filter the readings based on what you decided to plot, but you have been in control of the filtering process.

Carefully inspect the networks you have made, and note patterns that look significant in the relationships you have graphed. In the process of doing this, you may want to add some nodes and connections to make sure you have been as complete as you can be in what you decided to show about the text. You may also want to revise the way you are displaying your graph based on network statistics and the advanced editing options, to change the size and shape of your nodes and edge connections.

When you are happy with your data and your visualizations, think about what aspects of Snow Crash stand out to you from reviewing your visualizations. Make these aspects serve as the foundation of your essay. In the opening paragraph of your essay, explain what you chose to represent in your graph and try to assess how completely you have represented what you wanted to show. Explain how you decided to present connections.

Describe at the end of your first paragraph or the beginning of your second paragraph what clusters or patterns stand out to you in your networks. Develop the following paragraphs of your essay by reflecting on how these relate to the the contents of the novel, working with passages that help to higlight examples of the connections you are observing.

Choose to concentrate this in any way that seems interesting, and write your essay to guide me through your graph to show me what I need to notice. Use your graphs to direct me back to passages of interest in the book (which you should quote or describe in detail with your book open, and cite by page). These passages should help to highlight something important about the network you developed. Take your paper beyond the graphs you’ve created to help you discuss interesting patterns in the contents of the novel. Your paper should probably be three to five double-spaced pages long, or between 800 and 1500 words.

Both options:

Write a heading to your paper on the top left corner of page 1, but not appearing on later pages, giving the following information:

• Your Name
• This class: Englit 0626
• Links:
  • Kumu graph link or TimeMapper Network link
  • Google Sheet link
• Date of Submission

Upload your paper with your list of links for Digital Project 5 on the Assignments tab in Courseweb by the deadline, 12/09 (Monday of Finals Week) by 11:59pm.