2nd draft timeline – how archive reading relates to timeline – week 5

1st draft cultural map present & write 300 words on neighborhood in hayday- week 5

Imaginative map of what it looked like in hayday based on archival reading – week 6

See instructions on dropbox

 

Maps and the Culture of a Neighborhood

To use a map as a guide to the present culture of a bookstore’s neighborhood, we would first want to identify the name of the neighborhood, using any geographical names on the map as the starting point for a web or encyclopedia search that may uncover a history or demographic information. The next step would be to locate any libraries, museums, art galleries, music stores (for recordings or instruments) and any other bookstores in order to identify the institutional and commercial conservators and/or purveyors of cultural productions that are present in the neighborhood. Next, we should survey the retail environment: what kinds of businesses seem predominant in the neighborhood? What sorts of restaurants are in the area? Is there a cluster of certain cuisines? Finally, what houses of worship are there in the neighborhood? Once the particular neighborhood has been investigated, the neighborhood can then be plotted in relation to the larger city in which it’s located: What is the physical shape of the neighborhood (in terms of its geography and street layout)? Is the neighborhood in the city center or in an outlying district? Is the neighborhood a business or residential area, or is it a mixture of both? While it may not be possible to inventory all this information through and on Google Earth Pro, accessing even some of it will still help generate a more accurate picture of the culture of a bookstore’s neighborhood. And since it’s possible to use some of this information to get a sense of the history of the neighborhood (when a museum, library, house of worship, or particular retail store was founded and why), such an inventory will also offer a starting point for how to tie a timeline of the neighborhood to the past as well as the present.