"The City Born Great"
For my Textual Afterlives project, I chose to analyze and gather data from “The City Born Great” by author N.K. Jemisin. Within the world of this story, cities are dynamic, living organisms that must be “birthed'' once they reach a certain age or maturity. A person from the city is selected to act as a sort of “midwife” to help the city through this process and to protect it from enemies who attempt to thwart this birthing process. “The City Born Great” follows a young graffiti artist who is chosen to become the midwife to New York City as he grapples with homelessness and his Black and LGBTQ identities and fights for the city he loves. The story is deeply rooted in place, with the main character traveling throughout the city often and using language that conveys his familiarity with the intricacies of New York streets and landmarks. It is also, however, an incredibly global story. There are frequent references to other cities and countries around the world that also have guardians and midwives much like the main character. These references to national and international locations and influences on New York were what I chose to collect as my data set for The City Born Great.
First Visualization
For my initial visualization, I drew a map of the world and used red thread and push pins to trace the connections between New York City and all the other places referenced in the text, whether explicit references to locations and countries or allusions to things sourced from other cultures (e.g., Mexican food, Polish sausage, Swiss cheese). In putting together the data set, I first went through the text and highlighted and collected every mention of a location, both within New York City and the U.S. and internationally. I then hand-drew a map of the world, which helped me to feel more connected to the visualization. Although the map is not perfectly proportional, drawing it by hand rather than tracing made me more familiar with the geography of the places I was mapping. I selected red thread to stand out against the white background and wrapped the threads from a pushpin placed in New York out to each location. This initial visualization was meant to demonstrate the high degree of multiculturality that exists in order to produce New York City as we know it today and as it is represented in the text. While New York certainly has its own unique touchstones and monuments, it is also an amalgamation of countless places and people from across the globe; it is both its own entity and comprised of a multitude of differing cultural and geographical stories and experiences.
Revised Visualization
Showing the physical connections on a map between New York and these places was intended to demonstrate the massive amounts of energy used to travel internationally, from immigrants arriving on steamships hundreds of years ago to modern air travel. This energy usage, however, was not explicit within the visualization but implied; in my revisions, I chose to add a second element to the project in order to represent the amount of energy behind these various cultural exchanges. I calculated the amount of emissions for a round-trip flight to each location and strung 1 black bead per .1 metric ton of CO2 on each string to physically represent the different amounts of energy used on each flight. I also switched to green thread, as I felt that it better fit with the environmental and energy theme of the project. I then filmed a video of each string in the order in which they appeared in the text to show the chronological progression of the energy afterlives data in the text. The addition of the beads plus the video sequence helps the viewer see not only the cultural afterlives that make up New York, but the energy enabling the existence of those afterlives.
Works Cited
Jemisin, N. K. (2016, September 28). "The City Born Great." Tor.com. https://www.tor.com/2016/09/28/the-city-born-great/.
