Mapping the story out

While doing the mapping emotions project on hope from 1888 to 1899 I learned something new about crowd-sourcing. I learned what it was, more exactly. I had been wondering. But this project taught me that crowd-sourcing is looking in on something that is happening in a country while all of its cultural understandings are going on around, they are permeating and parallel to what is going on although there could be different meanings for things than you might expect.

Learning to understand the peoples feelings and concerns might take some searching around for their words and meanings in newspapers, on their emotions and about issues of importance. After looking into their feelings and reactions and the way they relate to things, we can begin to understand better what is going on and how people are feeling. Then we begin to gain a cultural understanding and knowledge about what the whole story is, or at least gain more clues as to where to go and what to do in the case of a disaster. How do people refer to things. That is the question to ask, not only to know how to get around in a different land in real life but also for writing a story.

Because I learned something cultural about hope in America during the years 1888-1899. I found a new and different meaning for it. A new emotional value. When different emotional values are available to authors they can be useful. They are something to work with and build story on. We could ask the newspapers why hope was a source of strength at that time and that could tell us some of the contemporary thoughts, feelings and intellectual conversations that society had been agreeing upon. These things could set up a story line detail or even give an author something to base a whole story on. Mapping emotions, gave clues to a furthered possibility of understanding an exigence.