"Mapping Appalachia with Digital Media" was a four-week course during the Summer 2011. The goal of the course was to introduce students to Mental Mapping, Applachian culture, tradition, and history, as well as web development. Mental Mapping is defined as personal point-of-view perception of their own world. It was important to also learn information about Appalachia as the majority of the maps were from the region. The Computer Science aspect was to build a website, where users could view a large selection of maps, which could be searched through based on location and different qualities.
The course began with an introduction to Mental Mapping, while the work outside of class was focused around developing personal websites for experience. In the 2nd week, the class focused on Appalachia, with reading and external focus on art styles and context from various media. As a class, we divided a selection of about 700 maps into 30-50 each. Renaldo Pierre-Louis and Cody Aldridge developed a system to upload maps and set individual topics, media, location, and author name to the website's database. Through this, large amounts of maps were able to be catagorized, documented, and uploaded in a short period of time.
The website was completed in the next week, in which each student played a role in creating the website, from logo, to writing text. In the last days of the trip, the class took a two day field trip to Virginia through the Appalachian Mountains.
Important Links:
APS/CSC 216 SyllabusMappalachia Trip Itinerary