Narrative Archaeology
Throughout the semester I keep returning to this article on Narrative Archaeology by Jeremy Hight, and I wanted to share it with everyone in the hopes that it might also help in these final stages of reckoning with mapping, data and spatial storytelling. I’ve included the link to the full article and excerpted a few passages here:
The narrative is embedded in the city itself as well as the city is read. The story world becomes one of juxtaposition, of overlap, of layers appearing and falling away. Place becomes a multi-tiered and malleable concept beyond that of setting and detail to establish a fictive place, a narrative world. The effect is a text and sound based virtual reality, a non passive movement, a being in two places at once with eyes open.
I found this quote particularly interesting when thinking about mapping traces :
Context and sub-text can be formulated as much in what is present and in juxtaposition as in what one learns was there and remains in faint traces ( old signs barely visible on brick facades from businesses and neighborhood land usage long gone or worn splintering wooden posts jutting up from a railroad infrastructure decades dormant for example) or in what is no longer physically present at all and only is visible in recollection of the past.
And the dual city (denotative and connotative):
There is at present a dual city to be read, the denotative and connotative city, if you will. The city exists to navigate and “read” on a literal level of interpretation of architecture, shifts, movement, traces of past and the patterns that form as one walks through the city. This is the denotative city. The author utilizing the concepts and form of narrative archaeology can form a reading of the second city (the connotative city or semiotically charged) with points in street layout pinpointed to address the resonance of multiple readings and resonances of buildings, street signs, navigation, infrastructure.
I found the following quote helpful in thinking about how to create a productive interplay of media assets within each data point. How can the media presentation of the information create resonances and metaphors, and how might that radiate outside each data point to resonate with other points (in the form of themes and arguments)?
In 34n118w’s meta-text are analysis of issues and concepts such as the resonance of data as rich with meaning, the lineage in technology of communication and transference of information from g.p.s ( back through ship reports, railroad infrastructure, Morse code…), and the many metaphorical readings of absence as presence and “ghost”.
The meta text is informed by the details and metaphors in individual narratives that are written to reference these ideas, again without the intrusion of the critical voice and dry authority.
Instead, what is allowed to build is a cumulative resonance. The author can slowly build through repetition and subtle similarities in detail and of course physical placement and interaction of story space with points in the physical city. The author can place the larger concept references and resonances in sequences of his/her design both thematically and to build through repetition but also in the streets and city-scape. The author now has the freedom and range to build “traditional” and “experimental” tools and forms in a new way that makes the author able to structure for effect within individual texts, within a larger sequence of texts, within individual and multiple physical points, readings and placements in the city, within a meta textual construct built in both the narratives and city cumulatively, and even more importantly with a powerful component of play
Here’s a link to the whole article if you want to check it out! http://www.neme.org/1556/narrative-archaeology
This is fantastic, Josie. Thanks for sharing! We used to use another Jeremy Hight article — about rhizomatic cartography — in UMA, but I cut it from the syllabus last year. This lovely piece on Narrative Archaeology would’ve been a great substitute.