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In this exhibit, I use Heganoo, which advertises itself as a “personalized interactive mobile map” to create a story about the fires that have occurred on Davidson College’s campus. Although Heganoo is limited in terms of overlaying historical images and maps on to current day scenes and creating a data-thick map, it is a useful tool to provide spatial context to a story that has an ordered plot. As can been seen below, the basic Heganoo event map provides numbered locations for a storyline:
I think that story lines are Heganoos speciality. Some of the alternatives to Heganoo are Neatline, which specializes in compiling information and allowing the user to explore independently, and History Pin, which makes historical comparisons easy by overlaying historical images onto Google Maps. Heganoo does not incorporate ambiguity or allow user interaction, which Bethany Nowviskie considers to be important attributes of Neatline. Instead, similar to Charles Cunningham’s “21 Steps,” Heganoo guides the user along a constructed story path and compartmentalizes information in order for it to be easily understood.
Not only could the stories of Davidson fires be told using another mapping tool, they could also have been told without maps altogether. However, as Farman argues in his article, “Site-Specificity, Pervasive Computing and the Reading Interface,” there is an importance in site-specificity and including the locations of the fires adds another dimension to the experience of the stories. In my exhibit, in addition to learning the details of each fire and some specifics about each building, knowing the location of each building allows the user to get a better sense of campus. For example, the location of older fires allows the user to get a sense of the old campus and the newer fire in Belk informs the user about how the college expanded down the hill. Additionally, the map enables the user to locate other buildings on campus, such as the church from which people ran to save the burning Watts dormitory.
In conclusion, I feel that Heganoo is the best application for presenting project similar to the exhibit I created that features the locations and stories about burning down Davidson College.