This project is a ArcGIS mapping of the mappable locations found in scenes of Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1 Issues 250-280. The goal of this project was to visualize the most important and frequented locations in these comics and maybe find some interesting patterns in the resulting map. The tools used for this project were python for data processing, google maps for coordinate collection, and ArcGIS Online for the making of the actual map.
I used the location data from the Claremont Run dataset. First, I used python to make a list of all of the unique location description strings in the dataset. Next, I manually went through this list and added coordinates as best I could for each location. Locations that were in space, on astral planes, or completely unplaceable were not mapped. Real-world coordinates for fictional locations were chosen with the help of research using marvel.fandom.com and uncannyxmen.net for the respective issues numbers. Imprecise or Fictional locations or such as “Australia” or ” were marked as needing more guess work and this can be seen on the “uncanny coordinate precision” layer. Fictional locations that could be precisely placed were not marked as guess work. The resulting spreadsheet looked like this
The last pre-mapping step was bringing this back into python and concatenating this data with the original location data resulting in a CSV of the format: “Issue”, “Scene”, “Time”, “Latitude”, “Longitude”, “Precision”, “Mappable”.
This was then imported to ArcGIS. The layers I made are:
- “uncanny locations pop-ups” which is a transparent layer that issues pop-ups that show the issue and scene number, the cover for that issue, the location description as it is found in the data, and whether a scene is a flashback. The cover and flashback outputs are custom functions. This is the only layer for which pop-ups are enabled.
- “uncanny locations heatmap” displays a heatmap of locations frequented by the storylines. It simply uses point density with the pre-existing heatmap function.
- “uncanny coordinate precision” shows whether or not I had to guess when choosing those coordinates. A large transparent circle means I had to guess while a small opaque circle means i was able to narrow down the location to within at least approximately 50 miles.
- “Fictional Places” simply adds some additional labels for fictional locations.
- “uncanny locations – issue dots” shows dots colored by issue number. Not a particularly useful metric with 30 issues but still able to show long term change.
The presentation of these layers is important as each shows a different piece of information about the data. For example Heatmap shows which locations are frequently mentioned by the writers and what parts of the world were regularly overlooked, for example all of South America. A the precision layer on the other hand functions to caution the viewer about trusting each datapoint equally, trying to more accuratly represent the accuracy of the data.
Significance:
This visualization applied to comics is maybe not the most useful to anyone who isn’t already a fan of these comics but the process and result have enormous potential. For example if someone wanted to track european/white expansion across America by each recorded violent conflict with Native Americans they would likely have to take a very similar approach, using informed guessing at coordinates to create a mostly accurate representation of history. The resulting timelapse map would be a really powerful visualization of how much europeans violated the Indiginous. Another example is the video of nuclear bomb tests over the last century, which vividly shows how often, and spread out these tests were.
Overall my take-away from this project has been that ArcGIS interacting with large datasets is a very powerful tool for visualization of spread out data, and though my midterm may not be so impactful, the tool most certainly has teh potential to be.
Sources
Coordinate Research:
marvel.fandom.com uncannyxmen.net google.com/maps
Images:
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