Journal of Maps

ISSN: (Print) 1744-5647 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tjom20

How can we map stories? A cybercartographic

application for narrative cartography

Sebastien Caquard & Jean-Pierre Fiset

To cite this article: Sebastien Caquard & Jean-Pierre Fiset (2014) How can we map stories?
A cybercartographic application for narrative cartography, Journal of Maps, 10:1, 18-25, DOI:
10.1080/17445647.2013.847387

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17445647.2013.847387

© 2013 Sebastien Caquard

Published online: 07 Oct 2013.

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Journal of Maps, 2014
Vol. 10, No. 1, 18 –25, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17445647.2013.847387

SOCIAL SCIENCE

How can we map stories? A cybercartographic application for narrative

cartography
∗
Sebastien Caquarda and Jean-Pierre Fisetb
a
Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec,
Canada; bClass One Technologies Inc., Ottawa, Quebec, Canada
(Received 23 January 2013; resubmitted 10 July 2013; accepted 26 August 2013)

Narratives and places are deeply connected. Places often contribute to the shaping of a story,
just as stories contribute to the production of spatial identities. Mapping narratives can thus
have a double goal: to explore the geographic structure of a story, and to better understand
the impact of stories on the production of places. While it may be easy to locate narratives
as points on a map, this type of representation is rarely relevant in capturing and
characterising the complex spatio-temporal dimensions of the narratives. In this paper, we
present a cyber-cartographic application designed to address this issue and provide solutions
to help properly map some of the many dimensions of narratives, including the places of the
narration (geography), the connection between these places (geometry), as well as the
temporal dimension inherent to storytelling. This application, originally developed to map
contemporary Canadian cinematographic narratives (see examples here: http://scaquard.
classone-tech.com/), opens new perspectives and raises a range of issues to mapping a
multitude of stories, including fictional work, vernacular knowledge, personal experience
and collective memories.
Keywords: narrative map; cinematic cartography; web mapping; cyber-cartography; Canadian
cinema; Ararat

1. Introduction
Films frame our geographic imagination. They associate images and stories to places, and con-
tribute to the shaping of how we perceive and experience these places. As emphasised by
Dudley Andrew (2006, 25), through the places they include and exclude, films contribute to
the production of ‘cognitive maps’ and frame the way we envision and understand the world.
The cartography of cinematographic narratives1 can then serve to explore how films may
shape our spatial imaginary. In more general terms, mapping narratives can also help to reveal
the geographic structure of stories as argued by literary scholar Franco Moretti (1999). It can
give ‘an image, a structure, a way to visualise form and narrative design’ (Bulson, 2007, p.3).
The recent recognition of the importance of the spatial dimensions of narratives has stimulated
the interest of literary scholars (see for instance Bushell, 2012; Cooper & Priestnall, 2011;
Piatti, Bär, Reuschel, Hurni, & Cartwright, 2009; Piatti & Hurni, 2011; Ungern-Sternberg,

∗
Corresponding author. Email: sebastien.caquard@concordia.ca

# 2013 Sebastien Caquard

 Journal of Maps 19

2009) while the maturity of online mapping technologies has enabled the emergence of new ways
of mapping stories as illustrated by the Litmap project developed by Barbara Hui (http://
barbarahui.net/litmap/) and by the ‘map-based storytelling’ project developed by ESRI (http://
storymaps.esri.com/home/). The cybercartographic application presented in this paper aims to
contribute to this endeavour of improving the cartography of narratives and more specifically
of cinematographic narratives.
Mapping cinematographic narratives requires overcoming two major challenges. First, it calls
for the transformation of audiovisual material into geographic data, which is a recurrent issue in
geography (Clairet, 2003). Second, it requires the development of new forms of cartographic
visualisations that can capture the fragmented spatio-temporal dimension of narratives. Both of
these challenges are introduced in the first section of this paper, which provides a contextualisa-
tion to the application that will be presented in detail in the following section. The potential of this
application to map narratives – as well as its limits – will be discussed in the last section through
the mapping of the Canadian film Ararat (dir. Atom Egoyan 2002).

2. The challenges of mapping narratives

A first methodological step required to map narratives is to break them into geographic bits and
pieces. This is a challenging phase since narrative places can be quite complex to locate (e.g. they
can be made of a combination of fictional and referential places; they can have an imprecise
geography; they can combine multiple scales). Barbara Piatti and her colleagues (2008) have
developed a reading grid to extract the locations – and characteristics associated with these
places – of hundreds of novels set in Europe since the eighteenth century. This grid inspired
us to develop an analytical grid dedicated to capturing the geographical elements of cinemato-
graphic narratives, such as the location of each scene (e.g. a city, a neighbourhood, an
address), the duration of the scene, the importance of the place in the narration, and the way
the place is materialised (e.g. Implicitly vs. Explicitly). This grid was applied to break down
the narratives of a selection of 46 contemporary Canadian films, including the film Ararat pre-
sented in the last section of this paper (See Caquard, Naud, & Gonzalès, 2012 for more details
about the geographic structures of Canadian cinema).
A second major challenge in narrative cartography is to map properly the geographic pieces
extracted during the data collection phase. To begin, a narrative map must simultaneously
represent places and relationships between places. As pointed out by Franco Moretti (2005),
there is a distinction in novels between geography (location) and geometry (relationships). The
geography – materialised by a map – must be associated with referential places, while the
geometry – materialised by a diagram – must represent the relationships between elements of
the story (e.g. characters, scenes). In literary cartography, the geometry is at least as important
as the geography (Moretti, 2005). As emphasised by Ungern-Sternberg (2009, p. 239), ‘Rather
than turning words into areas of which we know no contours, it could be more interesting and
perhaps more appropriate for a given text to create a map showing which places are linked to
each other in a narrative and in what way’. In other words, mapping narratives requires represent-
ing not only the different geographic locations of a story, but the geometry that exists between
these locations as well.
Mapping narratives also requires taking into account the temporal dimension inherent to
storytelling. While it is now easy to use online locational services such as Google Maps to pin-
point the geographic location of film shooting (see for instance http://www.themoviemap.com),
these representations are rarely appropriate to capturing and characterising the complex spatio-
temporal dimensions of narratives (Caquard, 2013). The process of mapping narratives calls
for the development of particular forms of maps that can capture simultaneously the temporal
20 S. Caquard and J.-P. Fiset

dimension of the narrative, as well as both its geometry and geography. These challenges provide
the framework for developing a web-mapping application dedicated to mapping narratives.

3. The design of the cybercartographic application

The design of the application presented in this paper was driven by the challenges discussed in the
previous section. It was also shaped by our will to develop a user friendly application for the end
user as well as for any individual interested in producing his own narrative map. This application
was designed by pulling together different tools available in different open source JavaScript
libraries. More specifically, this application is based on Nunaliit, an open source software devel-
oped at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) to render geospatial data in cybercartographic
atlases (http://nunaliit.org/) (See Brauen, Pyne, Hayes, Fiset, & Taylor 2011; Taylor, 2005;
Taylor & Caquard, 2006). This software has been combined with different tools from open
source libraries such as OpenLayers (http://openlayers.org/) and JQuery (http://jquery.com/) to
design the web mapping application presented here. The data that drives the map is fetched
from a spreadsheet saved in Google Docs. The geographic features generated are viewed by
using a web browser and the background map is provided either via OpenStreetMap – including
via the Stamen water colour design (http://maps.stamen.com/) – or via Bing and Google aerial
images.
The choice of a Google spreadsheet to structure the data was made to allow anyone interested
in designing his own narrative map to easily populate his or her own database. Each spreadsheet is
made of four sheets: ‘data’, ‘types’, ‘cities’ and ‘options’. The narrative data are structured in the
sheet called ‘data’, which is organised in four fields or columns (see Figure 1): (1) action defines
the location of the action based on a place name (e.g. a country, a city, a neighbourhood, an
address); (2) duration defines the duration of each scene in minutes; (3) type defines the way
different places are connected to each other in the narrative. For our cinema project we have
defined three major types: explicit (the location of the action is explicitly mentioned in the narra-
tive); implicit (the location of the narrative must be derived from personal knowledge or from the
unfolding of the narrative); and mentioned (a specific place, such as a city, is mentioned in the
movie while the action is taking place somewhere else. For instance, the action unfolds in Mon-
treal, while the characters are talking about New York City); (4) connection defines the places that
are connected to the action. These places are connected either because the action is moving from
one location to another one, or because a place is mentioned (e.g. a character mentions a place
during a discussion).
Places (geography) are represented by proportional symbols and connections between places
(geometry) by different types of lines. The size of the symbols (places) is defined by the amount of
time associated with each place in the narrative. For example, if 15 minutes of a film take place in
Toronto and 5 minutes in New York City, the circle representing Toronto will appear three times
as big as the circle representing New York City (see Figure 2a). For connections, the thickness of
the line is defined by the number of times two places are connected in the movie: the more often
the action goes back and forth between two places, the thicker the line between them will be.
Colours serve to differentiate the way places are materialised in the movie (e.g. red for places
mentioned explicitly, and orange for places appearing implicitly). Different types of lines are
used to represent different types of connections (e.g. plain lines represent the displacement of
action between two places, while dashed lines represent the connection between the place of
action and a place simply mentioned by a character) (see Figure 2b).
In the Google spreadsheet file, the sheet named ‘city’ can be considered as a gazetteer: it
includes all the different places mentioned in the narrative (and recorded in the sheet ‘data’)
with their X and Y coordinates. The sheet ‘options’ defines the bounding box of the narrative
 Journal of Maps 21

Figure 1. Screen capture of the Google spreadsheet used to structure the data that is then fetched by the
cartographic application. This example shows the first minutes of the movie Ararat (dir. Atom Egoyan
2002).

map as well as the name of the film mapped. Finally, the sheet named ‘types’ is used to define the
map symbology, including the size, outline, colour, and transparency of the different symbols (see
Figure 3). This structure allows the content developer(s) to have full control over the choices of
categories used for his narrative map, as well as of the cartographic representation. Anybody can
copy this spreadsheet, add his own narrative data and easily modify the categories, as well as the
way they will appear on the map. This application could then be used to map all sorts of narratives
beyond cinematographic ones.
The results are plotted via online mapping services such as OpenStreetMaps and Google Maps.
The data are rendered through time using a double slider control, or what is known as ‘temporal
focusing’ in geovisualisation (see Harrower, MacEachren & Griffin, 2000). This temporal represen-
tation follows the temporal structure of the narration: points and lines appear and grow while the
story unfolds. Temporal focusing allows the visualisation of selected moments in the narration
(e.g. a user may want to map only the second half of a movie). The user also has access to conven-
tional navigation tools such as pans and zooms. She can decide to visualise either the places of the
narration (geography), the connection between these places (geometry), or both simultaneously.
22 S. Caquard and J.-P. Fiset

Figure 2. These three maps represent the first 23 minutes of the movie Ararat, focusing on Toronto and
New York City. Figure (a) shows only the locations: at that point in the movie 5 minutes of the action
have taken place in New York City in the past (colour green), while 15 minutes have taken place in contem-
porary Toronto (orange circle is three times bigger). Figure (b) shows only the geometry, the links between
different locations: at that point in the movie the action has moved twice between Toronto and New York
City as well as twice between New York City and Armenia, and three times between Armenia and
Toronto (plain lines), while certain places such as Montreal (in the North-East corner) have been mentioned
by a character in Toronto (dashed line). Figure (c) shows the combination of both the geography and the
geometry.

Figure 3. In the sheet named ‘types’, the content provider controls the cartographic representation of the
data including the name and number of categories (column ‘type’), the colour of the symbols, their level
of opacity (i.e. How transparent is each symbol), their order when overlapping, the type of stroke for the
points and the style of the lines.
 Journal of Maps 23

4. A case study: mapping the narrative of the movie Ararat

The film selected to illustrate the potential of this web mapping application is Ararat (2002), a
Canadian movie directed by Atom Egoyan. This film tells the story of a contemporary young Cana-
dian of Armenian descent, who lives in Toronto and struggles with finding his place in a cultural
history deeply marked by the Armenian genocide of 1915. Ararat deals explicitly with the reper-
cussions of a traumatic past and the effect of exile on both the individual and the culture. Although a
deep analysis of Ararat is beyond the scope of this short piece, this film provides an interesting
illustration of the potential and limits of the cybercartographic application presented here.
What is really striking when mapping the narrative geography of Ararat is the strength of the
connections between Canada (mainly Toronto), Armenia, and New York City, as illustrated by the
thickness of the lines linking these places (see Figure 4). These strong geometric links materialise
the incessant back and forth movements between these places, as well as between past and
present, between the memories of the genocide and its cinematographic reconstruction in a
complex spatio-temporal narrative structure that is characteristic of Egoyan’s work. The impor-
tance of the geometry – of the links between places – is illustrated by the key role played by
Toronto’s airport in the overall story. The airport – which is considered as an archetypical
‘non-place’ by Marc Augé (1992) – becomes the point of contact of multiple collective and per-
sonal destinies. It links the present and the past, the father and the son, Armenia and Canada.

Figure 4. Screen captures of the narrative map of Ararat at three different times (after 15, 60 and
107 minutes), emphasising the importance of the back and forth movement in the narrative between
Toronto and Armenia as illustrated by the thick orange line connecting these two places. To see the live appli-
cation: http://scaquard.classone-tech.com/?key¼0Albv1GRK9_b4dGYydXVDZU41bHVYTHJGY1h4b
WlOS2c
24 S. Caquard and J.-P. Fiset

Although places are important throughout the movie, since they contribute to anchor the story into
some tangible and memorable locations associated with dramatic events, Ararat can be character-
ised by the prevalence of its geometry on its geography; of its spatial connections on its spatial
locations.
This example illustrates the potential of this cybercartographic application to reveal some
elements of the geography of complex narratives structures, as well as some of its technical
and more fundamental limits. In technical terms, the spreadsheet could be improved to make it
easier for users to enter their own data. We are currently in the process of dividing the grid
into two grids: one for the places visited, and the other one for the places mentioned, since
both types of spatial information can have quite different meanings. In terms of cartographic
design, the current version of the application does not allow automatic aggregation of points
and lines at various scales. Each point and line always appears independently of the zoom
level, which makes it difficult to visualise the changing structure of the phenomena at different
scales (e.g. local and global). A methodological issue that we are also currently addressing con-
cerns the refinement of our definition of a spatial cinematographic unit. There are many situations
where spatial units are difficult to identify clearly. For instance, what is the spatial location of a
scene that shows a movie being shot in Toronto, but depicting past events that took place in
Armenia? Beyond these technological and ontological issues, this project faces a more fundamen-
tal one, which is to map properly and in a systematic way dramatic and sensitive personal and
collective stories without completely erasing their emotional dimensions (Aitken & Craine,
2006). As argued by Doreen Massey (2005), there is an irony in turning a movement such as
migration into a line, which is basically what we have done with the mapping of Ararat. Although
we believe that the work presented here is a step in the direction of improving the cartography of
narratives, we are fully aware that such an endeavour requires a more serious reflection on the
meaning and consequences of mapping sensitive stories.

5. Conclusion
In practical terms, mapping narratives requires overcoming three major challenges: (1) locating
the different places associated with the story (geography); (2) representing the connections
between these different locations (geometry); and (3) taking into account the temporal dimension
inherent in any narrative. The cyber-cartographic application described here allows the simul-
taneous representation of these three dimensions. Mapped with this application, stories unfold
between nodal points and movements are provided by the connections between these points.
This first attempt at mapping narratives can have multiple applications for a wide variety of ana-
lyses, such as defining a typology of cinematographic narrative structures (Caquard and Naud,
forthcoming). In addition to cinematographic cartography, it can be used in different domains
such as literary cartography and oral history, and can help to visualise the geographic structures
of personal or collective stories. Although the outcomes of this project offer some promising per-
spectives on the future of narrative cartography, they also emphasise the difficulty of extracting
and representing properly important dimensions associated with places through narratives,
such as emotion and memory. Future developments in narrative cartography might require not
only some technological and ontological improvements, but also a better integration of more sen-
sitive narrative dimensions.

Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
The authors would like to thank the three reviewers of this paper as well as Taien Ng-Chan for their
 Journal of Maps 25

highly valuable comments and suggestions. Note: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 25th
International Cartographic Conference (Paris, 6th July 2011).

Note
1. Although the terms ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ can have different meanings in different disciplines, they will
be used as synonymous in this paper as generally accepted in dictionaries (e.g. Oxford Dictionary) and
encyclopaedias (e.g. Wikipedia).

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