After creating a timeline as well as mapping the memoir, it tells my group members and a lot about our memoir as I’m sure other students would agree as well. As I described in Blog Post #4, creating the timeline helped me better analyze the story and have all of the information organized in a timely fashion by using chronological order. The creation of the timeline also helped significantly in creating my story map. I found myself frequently referring back to our timeline for reference.
More importantly, the story map tied everything together for me.” We are drawn to issues of meaning, and space offers a way to understand fundamentally how we order out world.” (Bodenhamer 14) Everything in this class is completely new to me on analyzing a memoir. In the past, I would normally read and maybe reread a second time in order to point out key words and understand. With the process of tagging, transcribing, creating a timeline, and lastly a story map I truly have broken down the whole memoir. With the story map, by physically looking on a map I understood where Samuel Tippet had traveled during his lifetime and where the places he went to exactly where. Unlike many other memoirs other students had, he had not traveled much. This made the story map process a bit easier, because I was able to use one map to plot all of my points besides the city of London which was cut off a bit. Some students in class had characters in their memories that traveled all throughout Europe and even globally. Before reading Samuel Tippet’s memoir, I had no idea where Bristol or Kingswood were. Tippet traveled around England, but most of his places that he visited were relatively close to each other besides London! Some events were his birth, Hanham Mount (spiritual realization), and Bristol. Bristol is also where he pledged allegiance to God.
Personally, I found it very interesting to learn about because two summers ago I attended the London School of Economics and fell in love with London. It was my first time there, and I will definitely be back. Unfortunately, I had not gotten to see or experience the countryside of England. I also thought it was cool that Professor Faull was born here as well as she had great background info on this area!
While creating the story map, I used media from Google Images as well as some of our media that we used in our timeline. “Spaces are not simply the setting for historical action but are a significant product and determinant of change.” (Bodenhamer 16) The timeline helped me describe some of the events at each place on our map and make it a story. Another part that helped me was creating the Google Fusion table about what was used most in our memoir which was probably people and place rather than emotion. What I want our story to tell is that throughout Samuel Tippet’s life he visited a few places. However, through these series of events especially the Parish of Bitton. Tippet realizes how important God and religion are to him here. He later devotes his life to God and realizes that his prior mistakes made can be amended and forgiven through religion. He becomes very spiritual throughout his lifetime. Mapping memoirs ties all of our prior steps together and creates a story through small descriptions, an exact location placed on a map as well as photographs to depict the place. A quote that I really liked from the reading was “In practice, critics claimed, evidence about the world depends upon the perspective of the observer, a distinction that GIS obscures.” (Bodenhamer 19)
Morgan Graning is a junior at Bucknell University. She is a political science major and sociology minor. Morgan is from Long Island, New York.