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

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):

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:

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:

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:

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.