HELMERS . MAPS

. 5 .

Because the space of the web is unclear, I involve my students in creating maps. I mean something creative and almost archaic for a technological age: drawing the website onto paper. Translating the Web to a physical "flatland" map may seem counter-intuitive to the multimedia and interactive potential of the web. Yet, for students, this exercise works conceptually and through several medias to familiarize the virtual environment. The idea of site mapping is borrowed from David Sobel’s book Mapmaking with Children, targeted toward an audience of teachers in the elementary grades, and the creative modeling projects developed at the Interlochen creative arts camp in Michigan. At Interlochen, junior high school and high school students in music and theater were engaged in kinesthetic artistic activities, given modeling clay, pencils and paper, and a dance floor and asked to create, using the medium of their choice, a reaction to a dance, a poem, a piece. Sobel similarly draws on the power of the mind to conceptually reorganize media; he argues that mapping is an essential human activity.

Some of the advantages to this project are that, once the map of the website is completed, readers return to the familiar reading pattern of left to right. Recall that web design frequently makes use of layout that is circular, intentionally breaking down one-point perspective and the top / bottom script of traditional print media. In reimposing traditional formations on the space of the web, the students learn about the contrageometric design of sites while also employing a language of images and spatial associations that are comfortable to them as users. Thus, students counter one of the key difficulties of web design that Rosemary Sassoon identifies: the image or design patterns chosen by the website designer may not be intelligible to the user (172). Student users creating maps impose their own pathways onto the site, which is what they do everyday, each time they walk through a city, a campus, a museum, or a mall.

A simple site titled Victorian Fairy Painting provides an excellent on-line introduction to mapping that can extend students’ imaginations. The site is the on-line extension of an exhibition sponsored by the University of Iowa Museum of Art in 1998. Overall, there are eleven pages that encompass the website, but there are only six main information pages on the site. It is intrinsically interesting in its subject and it is fun and easy to map. 

Teachers can begin by brainstorming metaphors: how do we describe this site? Is it a museum, a tree, a gallery, a game board, a book, a home? These metaphors make the site less like an electronic text and more like a terrain to be explored. After reading through the pages with a partner and taking notes, students can begin to discuss how to direct users through the website. Since this site is linear, the real challenge is in deciding which metaphor to employ and thinking about the ways to represent that metaphor visually through a map. In creating a model of this project for teachers, I decided to stay with the wide use of trees and nests in the Victorian paintings and created a fanciful map of a fairyland. 

My students quickly embraced the spirit of this assignment. They brought cardboard and tablets of newsprint to the computer lab and spread them on the floor. Huddled in small groups of four around their paper, they sketched, colored, checked the computer, discussed. When they were finished, they distributed their map to another group, who used it to navigate one of the websites we focused upon in the class. That group then assessed the effectiveness of the concept and navigability of the map.

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Send mail to Marguerite Helmers, helmers@uwosh.edu