Mapping History: Narratives of 1848

Continuing some of the previous work that I’ve been doing to explore the revolutions of 1848 using digital tools, I have created two interactive maps that showcase a variety of the events and individuals involved in the 1848 revolutions. StoryMap JS and Google Maps both have tools for placing markers on a digital map with integrated captions and other media, but there are key differences in the ways that they present information and tell narratives.

StoryMapJS allows for the creation of an interwoven chronological slideshow that moves across the map, which to me made it ideal for a presentation connecting the dots of a single person’s life. For this presentation, I chose Mazzini, the Italian radical republican leader, as an individual to highlight that had strong connections to a number of the ideological currents that influenced the 1848 revolutions and who leaves a multifaceted and controversial philosophical legacy- much like the Revolutions of 1848 themselves.

For the interactive Google Map, I depicted a number of major flashpoints in the Revolutions of 1848 with a specific focus on the Austrian Empire. Of all the parts of Europe which faced revolutions in 1848, I found Austria the most interesting to make a map about because of their varied motivations and objectives, as well as the vast geographic distances that separated them.

I found both of these mapping tools very useful and applicable to my overarching project about the Revolutions of 1848. However, StoryMapJS will be most useful for narratives that stretch out over time, and makes the most sense to use when depicting a subject that travels, moves or spreads from one location to the next. Google Maps is somewhat more flexible and less specialized in the kind of information that it can present, but slightly less polished.

The Google interactive maps are able to add more information than simply planting markers by categorizing and color-coding different types of marked locations and events, which is absolutely a useful feature for illustrating highly complicated situations in which many different kinds of events may be happening simultaneously. Overall, I would say that both of these mapping tools were very convenient and straightforward to use, and the simple act of creating these maps has improved my memory of the spatial and geographic relationships between the events depicted.