Following the story: narrative mapping as a mobile method for tracking and interrogating spatial narratives

ABSTRACT

Museums and heritage tourism sites are highly curated places of memory work whose function is the assembling and ordering of space and narrative to contour visitors’ experiences of the past. Variations in such experiences within and between sites, however, necessitates a method that: (1) captures how guides, visitors, and exhibits interact within spaces when representing and performing history and (2) allows researchers to document those variations. We developed narrative mapping, a mobile and geographically sensitive form of participant observation, to enable museum scholars and professionals to systematically capture, visualize, and interpret tendencies and variations in the content, affective qualities, and spatial arrangements of museum narratives over multiple sites and across multiple tours at the same site. Two antebellum plantation museum case studies, Laura Plantation in Louisiana and Virginia’s Berkeley Plantation, demonstrate the method’s utility in documenting how stories are spatially configured and materially enlivened in order to analyze the ways enslaved persons are placed within these narratives.

KEYWORDS:

• Museums
• spatial narratives
• slavery
• mobile methodologies

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank our student research assistants for their help in data collection and analysis as well as the owners and staff of the plantation museums in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Stephen P. Hanna is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Mary Washington. His teaching and research interests include critical cartography and GIS and the interactions of race and memory in the production of tourism destinations, with particular emphasis on the mapping and interpretation of spatial narratives at historical sites.

Perry Carter is an associate professor of geography at Texas Tech University, USA. He received his PhD from Ohio State University in 1998. His research interests focus on human, social, urban, and economic geography. He gives specific focus to geographies of consumption, travel, tourism, and space and how these geographies construct racial identities. As a member of the multi-institutional Race, Ethnicity, and Social Equity in Tourism (RESET) research team, he has focused much of his research on the inclusion of slavery in the narratives of tourist plantations.

Amy E. Potter is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, USA. Her research interests include cultural geographies of the Caribbean, the African Diaspora, and US plantations.

Candace Forbes Bright is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at East Tennessee State University, USA. Her research interests focus on health disparities and disaster, racial geographies, and social networks. As a member of the multi-institutional Race, Ethnicity, and Social Equity in Tourism (RESET) research team, she has focused much of her research on the inclusion of slavery in the narratives of tourist plantations.

Derek H. Alderman is a professor of the Department of Geography at the University of Tennessee. His specialities include social justice, public memory, heritage tourism, and the African-American experience, from slavery to the post-Civil Rights era. He is the founder and co-coordinator of the RESET (Race, Ethnicity, and Social Equity in Tourism) Initiative.

E. Arnold Modlin Jr. is Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of History and Interdisciplinary Studies at Norfolk State University. Dr Modlin is a cultural and historical geographer who researches the connections of memory, race and historic places in the US South and the Caribbean, especially slavery-related landscapes. Dr Modlin is a founding, partner scholar with RESET (Race, Ethnicity, and Social Equity in Tourism), a multi-university research initiative.

David Butler is the Vice Provost for Research and Dean, College of Graduate Studies, at Middle Tennessee State University. Butler began his heritage tourism research in 2001 with the groundbreaking article, ‘Whitewashing Plantations’, and has since published many articles on this topic. Butler has been active in primary data collection in the field at plantation tourism museums including surveys of visitors, interviews of visitors and interviews of owners and docents at the sites.

ORCID

Derek A. Alderman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5192-8103

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation (Award #1359780)