Senghor on the Rocks

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Senghor on the Rocks is an online literature project published in 2008. Christoph Benda (text, geodata), Johannes Krtek (design) and Florian Ledermann (programming, production) have put the first novel with geographical and temporal coordinates under a Creative Commons license online.

action

On December 20, 2001, Senegal euphorically celebrated its first qualification for a World Cup when it became known that Léopold Sédar Senghor , the first president of the republic, had died in Verson . The novel uses the collision of these two events of national importance, which raised questions about the nature of independence and the identity of the country, as a narrative entry point. In three parts, Senghor on the Rocks deals with the immersion of a young man from Austria in the pulsating everyday life of West Africa.

In the first part of the novel ( Coupe du Monde ), the protagonist Martin 'Chi' Tschirner, who was hired as a camera assistant for a promotional shoot in Dakar , rushes through a confusing, sex-obsessed cameraman and an attractive production manager alongside a racist director, noisy and strange city. Within a few days he got himself into serious professional and private difficulties and defiantly decided to leave his previous life behind and to go on a journey through the completely unknown Senegal on his own.

In Djilor , the second part of Senghor on the Rocks , this journey really begins. Accompanied by the Senegalese Assane, who helps Chi from initially unclear motives, he travels to the holy city of Touba and sets off inland to bring the Mague - the venerable elders of an important Senegalese family - to Dakar. In the end, he becomes the victim of a willful cultural misunderstanding and has to leave Dakar.

Part III - L'Homme Tranquille - deals largely with the Petite-Côte , a touristically fully developed bathing region with luxury hotels, yacht clubs, event culture and inevitable losers of prosperity. Unwilling to be absorbed in the consumer-mad masses of tourists that pour over the Petite-Côte on New Year's Eve, Chi joins a local chef whose restaurant has been destroyed to make way for another French hotel complex. Chi supports the rebellious restaurateur's efforts to organize a party, the profits of which are supposed to finance the judicial challenge of the expropriation.

The entire story is told chronologically, in the first person and directly from the moment of the event, there is no superordinate, explanatory authority that could mediate between the contradicting “normalities” of the western world and African life. The reader - as well as the protagonist - has no more available than the slowly opening, subjective gaze of a young European. Florian Ledermann describes the novel as a fast-paced adventure that begins as a job, develops into an involuntary journey and culminates in the reflection of the possibilities and limits of cross-cultural understanding. The chronologically linear, monoperspectival structure of the novel facilitated its implementation as a "geo-novel".

Technical implementation

The aim of the developers was to offer the user / reader of the novel a novel, continuous reception experience with the cards. For this purpose, the map display provided by Google Maps has been further developed from a static, technical to a performative perspective, which is intended to correspond to the subjective, searching and sometimes confused perception of the novel's protagonist. The Google Maps API has been expanded to include four animation functions that offer a number of new options in the map display and thus bring the movements on the map closer to the experience of a "tracking shot". In addition, a movable, rotatable arrow was introduced instead of the markers and speech bubbles provided by Google Maps. The greater semantic openness of this sign also allows clear locations of action to be marked as well as viewing directions, moving objects or other areas in which an action is taking place.

The implementation is based on the principles of the microformats paradigm and was implemented in such a way that all data - geographic coordinates , zoom levels, arrow positions, journeys, etc. - are saved together with the text in an HTML document. With the style sheets deactivated, the novel can therefore also be viewed and printed out as HTML text. The user interface is implemented by means of a stylesheet and a script that is loaded and executed when the page is called up and interprets the spatio-temporal information contained in the HTML code.

design

Screenshot of the "book-a-like" user interface of Senghor on the Rocks

For the design, a book metaphor called “book-a-like” was chosen, which provides the reader with functions that are familiar from working with analog books. The user interface is a book that - once "opened" - offers text on the right side and the corresponding map image on the left. A bookmark enables you to return to the text after a pause. Even the book block was visualized, giving readers orientation as to how far they had advanced in the text. A separate book cover was created for each of the three parts of the novel . The cover illustrations, designed as collages , refer exclusively to the content of the book and push the technological aspect of the project further into the background. In the reception area, the cover of the first part in particular fulfilled iconographic functions and was quoted in numerous media reports, bibliographies and blog entries in the sense of an actual book cover.

The choice of a book as an interface for an online novel and the associated restriction of browser functions is a deliberate irritation as “non-compliance with the digital rules of the game”. Nevertheless, the design decision apparently contributed to the spread of the project and a. recognized by PAGE and Die Welt .

Criticism and dissemination

The project has received some attention in German-speaking and international media. The reactions in the press and blogs range from enthusiasm to skepticism:

  • "The novel Senghor on the Rocks by Christoph Benda is the first completely geotagged novel"
  • "... a literary event in its own right is the hugely impressive Senghor on the Rocks, the first full-length novel consistently illustrated with Google Maps."
  • "A Viennese author is causing a sensation worldwide with his online novel",
  • "This map has generated a lot of publicity again in the last month"
  • Inclusion in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 2 of the Electronic Literature Organization
  • In the dissertation project "Geomediale Literatur" by Annika Richerich / University of Siegen , Senghor on the Rocks is treated as a case study together with The 21 Steps , the FAZ Romanatlas and the Landvermesser project and is featured in recent publications under the categories "locative narratives" or as "geo -graphic novel "discussed.
  • "A wonderful experiment"
  • "Although the work is round, exciting and easy to read, it ended up in the electronic drawer and not in the mailbox of a publisher for the time being."
  • "Is that even an idea?"

Web links

http://www.senghorontherocks.net/

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Original quote: "It's a fast paced adventure that starts as a job, develops into an involuntary journey and culminates in a reflection about the possibilities and limits of cross-cultural understanding", http://www.smh.com.au/articles /2008/11/25/1227491538136.html (last on March 9, 2010)
  2. ↑ The term was apparently coined by Stephen Hutcheon (Sydney Morning Herald) and used by numerous bloggers and journalists - e. B. PSFK u. v. a. - adopted, cf. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/11/25/1227491538136.html (all pages last accessed on March 9, 2010)
  3. ↑ see: http://www.senghorontherocks.net/about.html
  4. ↑ Benda, Christoph and Ledermann, Florian (2008): Senghor on the Rocks: A Georeferenced Electronic Novel, p. 12, http://elmcip.net/critical-writing/senghor-rocks-georeferenced-electronic-novel (most recently on October 9, 2012)
  5. ↑ http://www.senghorontherocks.net/about.html
  6. ^ Reference for Benda Christoph at Base de récits interactifs ( Memento from January 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ cf. Exposé of the dissertation project "Geomedial Literature" by Annika Richerich / University of Siegen, http://www.uni-siegen.de/locatingmedia/haben/richterich.html?lang=de (last on March 9, 2010)
  8. ^ Gerdes, Claudia: Literature Marketing on the Web. In: Page. Ideas and know-how for design, advertising, media. 03.2009, pp. 52-57, here p. 56f
  9. ↑ Werner, Hendrik: Roman aus der Vogelperspektiven, Die Welt, December 1, 2008, p. 23, also: https://www.welt.de/welt_print/article2808343/Roman-aus-der-Vogelperspektiven.html (last on March 9, 2010)
  10. ^ Mey, Stefan in Wirtschaftsblatt, June 3, 2008: Writers discover the attraction of virtual maps ( Memento from December 21, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ Maps Mania June 16, 2008: The First Novel on Google Maps ( Memento from March 29, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  12. ↑ http://wien.orf.at/stories/325303/ (last on March 8, 2010)
  13. ↑ http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2008/12/best-google-maps-of-2008-part-one.html (last on March 8, 2010)
  14. ↑ http://collection.eliterature.org/2/
  15. ↑ http://www.uni-siegen.de/locatingmedia/haben/richterich.html?lang=de (last on March 9, 2010)
  16. ↑ Laura Borràs i Castanyer and Juan B. Gutierrez: The Global Poetic System. A System of Poetic Positioning. In: Jörgen Schäfer, Peter Gendolla (eds.): Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genre, Bielefeld: transcript 2010, pp. 345–361 - p. 349
  17. ^ Annika Richterich: Cartographies of Digital Fiction: Amateurs Mapping a New Literary Realism. In: The Cartographic Journal, 48.4 (2011), pp. 237–249 and Barbara Piatti: From text to map - literature cartography as a generator of ideas. In: Cartographic Thinking. Edited by Christian Reder. Vienna: Springer 2012, pp. 269–279. - p. 271 (available online at http://www.literaturatlas.eu/files/2012/08/kartographischesenken.pdf - last on October 22, 2012)
  18. ↑ The first book with GPS data: Web novel with Google Maps. In: Spiegel Online . November 26, 2008, accessed June 10, 2018 .
  19. ↑ Ö1 Higlights: Senghor on the Rocks. Reading in the digital age ( Memento from February 23, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  20. ↑ http://de-bug.de/medien/archives/buch-gemappt.html (last on December 1, 2009)