Methodology
Data
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As my project is focused on an author and her books, the data I used was by default the books. I chose to take a paper version of the books and not aN online version to be able to read the book and tap on my computer at the same time. 5 novels out of Jane Austen's six complete novels were chosen ; the choice was made by wheither I had read the book previoulsy or not. As I hade not read Mansfield Park before, it was therefore left out.
For practical reasons , to not have 5 heavy books, I checked out a book gathering all of her completed novels . For the author 's life, I took two biographies, one short and one extensive in order to have the most reliable data possible . As my data is mainly textual, I felt it would be strange if ; at one point, I did not used some text-analysis tool: Voyant was recommended to me. For the titles of the books I used, see Sources & Thanks .
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Website
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The project 's next step was to elect the support of the Porject, how I would showcased it. It was natural to choose a website, not only for the Digital appeal ( not using a Digital format in a Digital Class would have been strange) but also because it was the format allowing me the largest added contents ( music, videos, etc..).
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After some quich research, I founded two websites creating platforms that sounded equally nice: Weebly and Wix ( Wordpress seemed too blank). In the end, I elected to use Wix for its beautiful and highly personalizable templates.
Mapping
I quickly knew that for my project I wanted to create a map. Not only because it is a logical mean if you want to help people situate unfamialiar places but also because during class, we studied a project using an interactive : the Navigating The Green Book Project . As soon as I saw their map, I knew I wanted to emulated them.
However, I quickly realized it was not as easy as it seemed: I had to change platforms several times.
Mapping tools I used :
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Mapwarper : whatever mapping tool I would used, my idea was to have a map taht would look like one Jane Austen could have use in her time. So I needed to find a good quality historic map ( which was not easy) and georeferenced it ( superpose it on an actual google satellite map). Passed one hour or two , Mapwarper being rather easy to use once the concept is understood ( you need to create several identical reference points on you historic map and the google map ),I had a georeferenced map ready to be used.
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Mapbox : I then headed to Mapbox, intented to recreate The Navigating the Green book map à la Jane Austen. However, Mapbox proved to be quite difficult for me to use and understand given the timeframe to create and present the project but above all given my non-existent knowledge of Coding. In the end, I used Mapbos to create a backkground layer for my actual map.
After several researches , I was despairing a little. Either the mapping platform was not free or it was abandoned and not having the functionality I wanted (adding my own background layer and creating an itinerary). My teacher recommended me Archis webmap which finally allowed me to used my Excel Spreadsheets with the data I gathered from the books and have my own background layer.
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However,I struggled with having an itinerary: I had points but there were not links between them, no itinerary.. In the end, I discovered, I could manually draw on the map and used this function to linked the cities by book/ and Jane Austen's lives which ended in the map ou can see on the Map page .
( I had to give up the itinerary function though , which saddens me a little...).
