I decided to put together a small map of some of the street
art around the Milwaukee area. The images I used were inspired by the fact that
they were images of street art around Milwaukee, but the platform that I decided
on had a little bit more of a decision process. I was going to use
Thinglink.com, but to start making a project (or even have access to explore
the site and what it can be used for) I needed to enter an invitation code.
Maybe I set my account up wrong. After that, I decided to give Knight Labs/Storymaps
a go. Knight Labs was a lot more accessible, and after logging in using google
(that’s right, there wasn’t even an account creation process for me to mess up
like I potentially did with Thinglink) I was able to go right into putting a
map together.
The process of creating the map really only furthered my
understanding of Milwaukee’s street art in one way. Although it was a single
aspect of understanding that was furthered, it might have been the most real
aspect of my understanding so far. Before putting together the 8 major street
art installations onto the map, looking up the addresses of each, and being
able to see them organized together, I hadn’t really considered the actual
location of the murals. After making the map, I realized I drive past most of
these on a daily basis. Even though furthering this aspect of understanding
might seem insignificant, being able to situate aspects of a texts in the real
world is valuable when trying to get readers to engage with the text. It was even
enough to make me go back and read an article that I’d already read several
times looking for (and finding) new information about some of the murals.
I don’t now nor have I ever questioned the value of
visualization since having learned about it. In fact, I really found value in
putting together this map, and I’ll probably head out to see some of the art
that I’ve been mindlessly driving past as soon as the weather turns. My one
hesitation, though, is that even just googling images and locations of street
art and then plugging them in to the site that I found to work was a bit time
consuming. Of course, my students would have the benefit of me suggesting a
site (and maybe even having a fancy invite code for one), so their decision for
which site to use might take up a significantly smaller amount of time. I think
because of the time it might take I could see myself using multimodal visualization
to introduce topics that might be difficult to connect with for some students.
I could also see using it for groups of students to put together information to
teach their peers something, but I don’t think that I would have developed the
same connection with the material if I hadn’t produced the map myself, so I’m
not sure if I buy into having students create things for demonstration in the
hopes that their peers will learn as effectively from just consuming the
project.
