After missing class, I was worried I would be behind but I am already familiar with the Google Maps API. I was excited to learn about Fusion Tables. I would have loved to use it when I created a map of some Historically Black Neighborhoods for a class. We used data from a Wikipedia page (we ended up hard coding in the latlongs, although we could have used JSON using Kimono).

However, I found FusionTable layers to unwieldly (difficult to customize infoWindows, create onClick events). It would have been easier to convert the FusionTable into JSON and recreate from there (or I will work with CartoDB). So, I have a very simple map of the Moby Dick location references.

My design proposals:

  • onClick: make a call to the Wikipedia API for an extract from a page about the location clicked
  • onClick: make a call to the Yelp API to find a nearby cafe to read the book on location
  • overlay a map of Herman Meville’s travels
  • overlay a map of popular travel locations in his time period
  • overlap a map of the most mentioned places in the new in his time
  • a slider time progression (per chapter intervals) : a good chapter summary