Google Mapping Travel Narratives: Lolita

Prep: In Google maps, create a map entitled “Nabokov’s Lolita.” Put in place markers and descriptions of the first few places mentioned in the novel to give the students an idea of what the map will look like in the end.

On your course wiki or website, create a table to organize the map. Add columns to the table with the following titles: Place, Page Number, Found by, Added to Map by, Problems. This allows you to keep track to who found what, who added what to the map, and gives the students a place to note any problems that they run into. The students need to be able to edit this table themselves. Here’s a link to the table I created on my course wiki.

In-class: Have the students create Google accounts. Have them send you an email from that account. Using that email, invite them as collaborators to the map.

Explain the basics of mapping a novel (I showed students maps of The Devil’s Highway and Ulysses, and there are many more on the Google Lit Trips website.

Show them the Lolita map that you have created and explain that they will receive and invitation to the map that will allow them to edit it.

Show the students the basics of how to create and edit a map. Have them create a map of their own, add a few places, edit them, etc. You want them to get a feel for the Google maps interface.

Show them the table you’ve created to organize the map creation. Tell them to add locations to the table as they read the novel.

I didn’t have students begin adding locations to the map until we had finished the novel. At that point we had a long list of places. In class we had a discussion of how we wanted to deal with places that didn’t exist, places where the chronology of HH and Lolita’s travels becomes unclear in the novel, etc. We created a key for the map and there were some issues of representation that we decided to deal with after the map had begun to take form. At this point I also reminded them of the “Problems” column in our organizational table on the wiki and that if they ran into any problems with the map, they should note them there.

I visited the map in class every day to encourage them to keep adding and set a soft deadline for adding locations. I also monitored the “Problems” column on the organizational table and dealt with problems in class as they arose. When the map seemed to be completed, I checked through it and brought up any concerns that I had in class.

Once the map has been completed, it deserves a day’s discussion in terms of how it relates to reading the novel. The students will not automatically see the usefulness of the map.