Google Lit Trips for Higher Education

The Travels of Marco Polo

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 05:52:20 -0800

The book now known in English as The Travels of Marco Polo was written around 1298 by Rustichello of Pisa, who met Polo in a prison in Genoa and became his ghostwriter. Its original title (in Old French, which was then the predominant literary language in northern Italy) was Le Divisament dou monde, or The Description of the World. In modern Italian, the book is best known as Il milione, or The Millions.
Marco Polo was by no means the first European to travel to China, or to visit the Court of Kublai Khan. He was, however, the first to set down a detailed record of what he had seen, and thanks to Rustichello’s literary skills his book soon became a popular bestseller and eventually an indispensable part of world literature.
Contrary to what most people believe, Marco Polo’s book isn’t really a travel narrative. Other than in the prologue, there are almost no references to Polo’s own person or to adventures that he may have had during his long travels. He simply describes different regions of Asia, moving from one town or province to the next, at times providing realistic descriptions, at other times giving only obvious fairy tales. For this reason, there has been considerable scholarly debate over what kind of book this actually is: an ethnography, a cartographic work in narrative form, a guide book for merchants, or merely a collection of anecdotes. Some people have even suggested that Polo never ventured to China at all and merely cobbled together existing sources.
Because of the book’s strange structure, it is in fact impossible to provide an exact route of Polo’s travels through Asia. While a number of maps purporting to do just that exist on the internet, this Lit Trip takes a different form. First, it provides geographical overlays showing the political division of the Mongol Empire and the course of the Silk Road, i.e. the route that other travelers between Europe and China are known to have commonly taken. It then adds markers for every single place that Polo mentions, presenting them in the order in which they occur in the text. Viewers are invited to draw their own conclusions, and to decide what Polo’s intentions may have been, whether he indeed traveled to China, and what route he may have taken.
About the Contributors
This Lit Trip was created jointly by the students of “GE 13186 – Fictions of the Known World,” a freshman seminar at the University of Notre Dame taught by Professor Tobias Boes of the Notre Dame German Department. Detailed project credits can be found inside the KMZ file..
Because of time constraints, only the prologue and first three chapters, which describe Polo’s voyage to China, were annotated. We hope to provide annotations for the remaining chapters, dealing with Polo’s journeys while he was in the employ of Kublai Khan, in the near future.
Questions and suggestions for revision should be sent to tboes@nd.edu.

Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

Mon, 2 Feb 2009 05:54:19 -0800

About the Contributors...
This Google Lit Trip was developed jointly by the students of "GE 13186 - Fictions of the Known World" at the University of Notre Dame under the supervision of Professor Tobias Boes (tboes at nd dot edu) during the fall semester of 2008.
Students were divided into four groups of various sizes, and assigned the task of either creating KML markups for specific locations mentioned in the novel (Lübeck, Travemünde and Beyond), or of presenting pertinent background information in geospatial format (The Hanseatic League, The 1848 Revolution). The goal of this exercise, and of the class as a whole, was to show that literature can act as a kind of map and has a profound effect on the ways in which a culture imagines its place in the known world. A secondary goal of the Lit Trip assignment was to raise student awareness of intellectual copyright issues; all quotations required proper citation and all images had to be either in the public domain or had to undergo prior copyright clearance.
Tobias Boes (tboes at nd dot edu) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame, where he specializes in German culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in the history of the novel. The names of all the students who were involved with this project can be found within the Lit Trip itself. For more information about German Studies at the University of Notre Dame, please visit: http://www.nd.edu/~grl/german/index.html.

The Hyakunin Isshu One Hundred Poets in One Hundred Poems

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:05:11 -0800

The Hyakunin Isshu, in particular the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, is a collection of 100 poems by 100 different poets. About 750 years ago, the poet Fujiwara no Sadaie (also known as Teika) selected them. They are fairly chronologically ordered from the seventh through the thirteenth centuries. The poems are all ‘waka’ (now called ‘tanka’). Waka are five-line poems of 31 syllables, arranged as 5, 7, 5, 7, 7. The simplicity and beauty of the poems is still very much appreciated in Japan and abroad.
The Hyakunin Isshu Google Earth project is particularly interesting in that each poem is linked to a beautiful website that provides extensive additional resources for appreciating the poetry.

About the Contributor...
Hetty Litjens
“I learned a few languages and enjoy entering uncharted territory. I am in early retirement and it feels as if my life is beginning for real just now. Google Earth gives you the possibility to enter the backyards of other cultures”
“I am infatuated with these poems myself.
Their charm is that they express the feelings, emotions, hopes, fears, happiness and sadness of real people living about a thousand years ago. We see the world through their eyes. Their observations become ours. In Japan and everywhere people are still enjoying the beauty of the cherry blossoms. The poems are short, compact, have puns and double meanings, everything to make them interesting even now. They connect life of a thousand years ago with our life, with Japanese history, culture and nature. School children in Japan are still playing the Hyakunin card game. Books continue to be written about them. And this can go on for another thousand years.”
This incredible collection of 100 poems by 100 different poets was developed by Hetty Litjens, who also developed the Lit Trip for Traveling With P.G. Wodehouse.

. *The author of this Lit Trip maintains an external download site which is continually under revision. To download the latest revision click the View in Google Earth link on this page.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:53:14 -0700

About the Contributor...
Matthew Hart Granada High School in Livermore, CA and an adjunct teacher at Chabot College in Hayward, CA 
He has a Master's Degree in English Literature, specialized in 20th Century American and English Literature, and wrote his master's thesis on Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

Matthew has presented the Google Lit Trips project during a session at the California Association of Teachers of English Conference at Fresno in 2007.  Matthew hasn't won any awards, but his wife and children really love him.

The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson by Mary Rowlandson

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 06:39:52 -0800

The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson, first printed in 1682, tells the story of the author’s seven weeks and five days spent living with Native Americans. The book is considered a seminal work of American captivity narratives.

About the Contributor...
Jon Miller
http://www.jonmiller.org The University of Akron.

Jon Miller is an Associate Professor of English, at the University of Akron in Akron, Ohio. where he teaches American literature from the beginnings to about 1870. He also teaches American literary and cultural history.
Jon Miller...
• has published extensively on the interpretation of American literature in the context of the history of drinking and temperance reform
• has served as the editor of The Social History of Alcohol Review and the Alcohol and Drugs History Society's Daily Register.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 07:12:20 -0700

Presentation created by David Herring, University High School, Tucson, Arizona

Be sure to visit David Herring’s excellent Google Earth Education Community website at http://edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/dherring/ge/googleearth.htm for great resources for using Google Earth in a wide variety of curricular areas.
Contact: david.herring@tusd1.org

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:44:31 -0700