Google Earth as a Visual Memory Prompt in the Collection of an Oral History from a Man with a Neurodegenerative Disorder ABSTRACT
This paper explores the uses of interactive maps in the collecting of oral histories as a visual memory prompt. Building on Günel’s idea of patchwork ethnography, I attempt to collect my dying stepfather’s immigration story from our separate homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a mediated interface of shared screens, we attempt a virtual go-along interview using Google Earth, entering the field together, remotely. This patchwork geonarrative combines traditional methods of oral history with a virtually simulated spatial video geonarrative to address the question: How can we do oral history under conditions that render a face-to-face interview impossible? I argue that this hybrid method creates an avenue of participation for informants who aren't accessible through traditional interview methods while providing visual prompts that can elicit greater nostalgia. This study aims to highlight how a GIS method is both a practical and ethical solution for interviewing interlocutors with disabilities. LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
GIS Geographic Information Systems
MSA Multiple System Atrophy SVG Spatial Video Geonarrative INTRODUCTION
Spring 2020 was a strange time for everyone. The world was shut down, and we were all forced to shelter in place for an indeterminate amount of time, while still required to work as usual. New configurations for working from home were invented on the fly, and almost all social engagements were to be conducted through screens. The video conferencing software Zoom very suddenly reigned supreme (Iqbal, 2020).
I unexpectedly found myself finishing my final semester at Binghamton University online. Meanwhile, back home, my stepfather Jose’s health was rapidly declining from a rare degenerative neurological disease called Multiple System Atrophy (MSA). The doctors predict he will only have a few more years to live, and he is losing all speaking and motor skills. I had been meaning to do some kind of oral history project to collect some of his stories before he is completely aphasic. As was the case for many people in the early days of the pandemic, I was spending a lot of time on the phone trying to satiate my need for socialization. Catching up with my family allowed me to see how severe Jose’s condition had become. Suddenly the need to capture his story became urgent. Jose and I jointly decided to have him tell the story of his immigration from El Salvador to the US during the civil war of the 1980s and for me to then turn it into a short documentary film so that his children, my siblings, could learn more about their heritage.
Oral history has long been a tool of ethnography in anthropology (Crapanzano, 1980; Di Leonardo, 1987; Shostak, 1981), including those of impaired persons (Biehl, 2005), however traditional interview methods have limited the diversity of participants by the reliance on an informant's capacity to carry out the physical aspects of the interview. For example, persons with physical disabilities that render spoken face-to-face interviews challenging or impossible have been left out of anthropological research (J. Reno, personal communication, July 16, 2020). New methodologies, made possible by digital innovation, allow access to communities that would otherwise be inaccessible. Case in point: because Jose’s disease put him at high risk if he contracted COVID, there was no way I would have been able to conduct an oral history face-to-face, so we resolved to use the teleconference software Zoom. His speech was already impaired by the time we conducted our interview, so I decided to use a visual to facilitate his storytelling process. Using the computer program Google Earth helped me to understand his speech which is often slurred, and also acted as a visual memory prompt for him to elicit the telling of his immigration story. I argue that in the current state of the world, this method of digitally- facilitated narrative collection which is not only ethical, in keeping those at high risk safe from the ongoing global pandemic, but also practical for anyone who is limited in travel due to their own physical capabilities, financial concerns, or government-mandated travel restrictions. What ultimately arose from a set of limitations ended up turning into a productive methodological tool.
The use of geographic information systems (GIS) tools such as Google Earth to approach and capture oral history originated in cultural geography and is beginning to make inroads in anthropological studies. In geography, Kwan and Ding (2008) have developed the geonarrative method as a means to collect location specific qualitative data by placing informants in their spaces of their stories to produce an environmentally cued narrative. In this work they note the ways in which these geographic tools can be used to recover silenced voices of marginalized people (2008). In my project, I build upon this methodology by co-opting geographic technologies and geonarrative to enable the participation of a person with disabilities.
Using what I’m calling a patchwork geonarrative, I attempt to answer the questions: how can we do oral history under conditions that render a face-to-face interview impossible? Examining the geographically situated narrative of Jose’s immigration autobiography, I break down the methodology used to collect his story, parse its pros and cons, and consider potential applications and expansions of such a method. My hope is to highlight and inspire new avenues of use for a tool that is accessible to most people.
THEORY
Patchwork Ethnography
A new theoretical idea is breaking ground in how we think about ethnographic research called patchwork ethnography (Günel et al., 2020). Growing from the feminist and decolonial critiques within the field of anthropology, Günel and colleagues’ June 2020 manifesto calls for a reframing of fieldwork. The days of spending 12-24 months fully immersed in the “field” are no longer realistic for most researchers. Taking families, work obligation, financial constraints, and personal lives into consideration, along with the idea that field no longer needs to be on the other side of the planet, patchwork ethnography refers to “the ethnographic processes and protocols designed around short- term field visits, using fragmentary yet rigorous data, and other innovations that resist the fixity, holism, and certainty demanded in the publication process.” Patchwork ethnography recognizes that changes in our professional and personal lives are changing the production of knowledge (Günel et al., 2020). This emerging idea helps us reconsider “what counts as knowledge and what does not, what counts as research and what does not, and how we can transform realities that have been described to us as ‘limitations’ and ‘constraints’ into openings for new insights." (Günel et al., 2020). Blurring the boundaries between field and home had been called into question even before the recent global pandemic (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997), but now with social distancing policies and travel restrictions there is even more of a push to consider socially distant methods of conducting research.
Patchwork ethnography goes beyond challenging the difference between home and field to question divisions of the personal and professional, subject and self, theory and method (Günel et al., 2020). The case study used in this paper exemplifies these blurrings: remote fieldwork from home, a personal relationship brought into my professional life as an oral history that reflects my own family's heritage. The separation of once hard-lined categories has become undone, creating a method of research that ultimately culminates in the creation of a short documentary film, which once again rests at an old boundary, where science becomes art. Using Günel et al.’s theoretical framework, I adapt it to the circumstances inscribed in Jose’s and my limitations to create what I call a patchwork geonarrative. METHOD
Oral History
Alessandro Portelli, perhaps the best-known oral historian, defines oral history as "... not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, what they now think they did" (1981, as cited in Freund, 2009 p.23). This is to say that there is no one empirical history, and that every story will be told with subjective variation depending on its audience. For this reason, Alexander Freund (2009) considers oral history a form of researcher-generated data. There is no way to simply capture the narrator's story because it is a co-construction of both the interviewer and interviewee (Portelli, 1981; Passerini, 1987; Briggs, 1986; Hart, 1996; Goodwin, 2015), as are all interviews, according to Briggs (1986). Even the choice of language used will affect the way that story is told. For instance, in the case study provided, Jose’s first language is Spanish, while the interview is conducted in English. This choice of language (a necessity, as I do not speak Spanish) undoubtedly lacks the cultural nuances that could be provided in an interaction with another native speaker (Briggs 1986).
Charles Goodwin takes this idea of co-construction even further in his work with Chil, an aphasic man, who is only able to speak three words after suffering a severe stroke (Goodwin, 2004). Despite the man’s limited vocabulary, Goodwin aims to prove that Chil is capable of communicating complex narratives through a mix of body language (gesture) and the voice of his fellow interlocutor. Using the few words Chil can manage, he guides his conversation partner to tell his story for him. Communicating the thoughts of a nearly mute man through another person’s voice perfectly illustrates the idea of co-creation. While Jose’s speech at the time of the interview was nowhere near as limited as Chil’s, a similar technique was used to draw out his immigration tale. In order to check my own understanding, I would often reiterate ideas that took him a long time to convey in speech. These check-ins are evident in the film, where larger narrative plot points are spoken by me and Jose replies with a simple “yes.” This summarizing technique has become habitual in my family as Jose’s speaking abilities fade. I recognize that had his oral history been collected by another person, a different narrative would have emerged. I brought my own vocabulary, understanding of his speech, understanding of his story, and history of our relationship to the conversation that could not be separate from myself no matter how neutral I tried to be in the storytelling event (Kwan and Ding, 2008).
Geonarrative
There is strong evidence that methods which incorporate visual memory prompts result in more elaborate oral histories (Buckle, 2018). Documents and photographs are among the most common visuals used to elicit nostalgia (Kwan and Ding, 2008). Researchers have found visual stimuli helpful in prompting interlocutors when they felt they had little to say (Buckle, 2018). Because Jose’s story hinges upon his migration and is thus inherently one about place and movement, finding a visual method suited to elicit memories that are tied to geographic locations was central to this oral history project.
Geographers have explored using place as a catalyst to unlock memory, utilizing methods such as navigating hard copy maps (Buckle, 2018), sketch mapping (Curtis et al., 2018), creating memory maps (Buckle, 2018; Carroll, 2018), conducting ‘go-along’ interviews (Curtis et al., 2018), geonarratives (Kwan and Ding, 2008), and spatial video geonarratives (SVG) (Curtis et al., 2015) as a means of allowing location to become the central pivot around which narrative is organized.
Geonarratives are unique in that they physically place informants within the locations reflected in their stories. Kwan and Ding define the method as “participants interact[ing] with [their] environment and using its stimuli to trigger both spatial and social insights” (Kwan and Ding, 2008, as cited in Curtis et al., 2018 p.2). Documenting life history in this way breaks from the traditional form of chronological storytelling (Czarniawska 2004 in Kwan and Ding 2008, 449) and allows geography to organize the narrative. The methodology builds on the idea of geographic embeddedness, where memory is triggered by “emplaced” sensory experiences that lead to more geographically specific features and deeper explanation (Curtis et al., 2018 p.3).
Spatial video geonarrative (SVG) is a type of geonarrative that uses cameras and GIS to record and pinpoint fine-scale geographic characteristics of an area during a storytelling event in order to identify geo-spatial patterns (Curtis et al., 2015). This methodology has been used in many quantitative research studies to investigate patterning in datasets tracking crime events, mosquito control, and TB in homeless populations (Curtis et al., 2015). Only more recently have scholars begun to incorporate virtual interactive maps such as Tour Builder 3D and Google Earth into geonarratives (Buckle, 2018; 2020). However, these methodologies have predominantly been utilized in the field of geography.
Anthropologists have started to use GIS technology for the purposes of qualitative research. The ArcGIS storymapping program is growing in popularity within the discipline to showcase geographically centered data including oral histories (Hart, 2020). Story maps “...tell the story of a place, event, issue, trend, or pattern in a geographic context... [by combining] maps with other rich content—text, photos, illustrations, video, and audio” to create an interactive user experience (Carroll, 2018). In one example, a group of feminist anthropologists used this technology to connect oral histories from unrelated women from across the globe in a project called WomenWeLove (Feminist Research Collective, 2020). The resulting storymap functions as a geographically organized visual ethnography that allows users to submit the life stories of “ordinary women” (Dennis et al., 2020).
While storymaps are a great way to present data geographically, the field of anthropology would benefit further from using geo-spatial methods in the process of data collection. This project borrows from cultural geographers and applies these methods to the hallmark of anthropological inquiry: an ethnography, or more specifically an ethnographic oral history. In the case study provided, the same means lead to different ends. Rather than using a virtual SVG to pinpoint data clusters using GIS to analyze spatial patterns, the video recording of Jose’s interview was used to capture the narrative as a visual output for the production of a visual ethnography. The geographic data served as catalysts for story elicitation, not to make any claims about specific geographic coordinates discussed. The focus of the research was on the personal narrative with locations facilitating that purpose.
A geonarrative produced by screens perfectly places itself in the domain of patchwork ethnography as it lifts the restrictions imposed by remote fieldwork, physical impairment, or other issues that may prevent a researcher or informant from entering the field. I build on Kwan and Ding’s argument (2008) that GIS methods hold great potential for generating narrative data by demonstrating how virtual technologies can create access to field sites and excluded communities in the production of oral history in ethnography. Melding the ideas of a patchwork ethnography and geonarrative I call this hybrid method patchwork geonarrative.
USING PATCHWORK GEONARRATIVE TO TELL JOSE’S STORY
Jose was born in Sal Salvador in 1967 to a traditional middle-class family with strong Catholic values. The second eldest of four children, he was twelve years old when the militarized conflict that later would be known as the Salvadoran Civil War began. He and his family fled the country within a year, and he has been living in the Chicagoland area ever since. Jose married my mother in 1997 and became stepfather when he was 29 and I was twelve.
Now 52, he suffers from a fatal neurodegenerative disease that is causing his brain to slowly shrink and all of his systems to shut down. The average life expectancy of a person living with his condition, once diagnosed, is about seven to nine years. Jose started showing symptoms around five years ago. As his speech and mobility decline, the urgency to capture his stories became more pressing. He volunteered to interview with me and gave me his permission to use the information obtained in our interview for this paper as well as the film that was created from the recorded storytelling event.
Jose was able to tell his story through a hybrid of a traditional open-ended interview and a virtually mediated SVG. The storytelling event took place in April of 2020 during the early weeks of the shelter-in-place mandate. Jose and I did a preliminary interview a few days before the actual recorded interview where we tested the technology to make sure that we had a mutual understanding of what was to happen during the narration. No training was provided in how to use Google Earth as Jose assured me that he was well versed in the program and didn’t need any instruction on the features. In this preliminary discussion, we went over the general plot points he was to cover without having him tell the full story as I didn’t want the recorded delivery to feel rehearsed.
The format of the interview was semi-structured following a basic list of questions that Jose had seen beforehand. These questions were used to guide the narrative and fill in gaps when needed (see Appendix for list of questions). He provided me with a list of addresses to key sites that would be covered in his story that we could reference and have quick access to the day of the recording. The entire storytelling event was recorded via the record meeting function on Zoom, which I hosted. I then permitted Jose (my guest) to use the shared screen feature while he ran Google Earth from his computer (Figure 1). Aerial view maps were used for a majority of the interview. This was partially due to issues with coverage (see “Coverage” below) and partially because of Jose’s familiarity with the software (see “Literacy” below). Google’s street view and 360° panoramic functions were used when available to inspect specific buildings that were significant to his narrative: the airport where he first arrived in Chicago, his high school, his first two homes in Chicago. I also used the ruler feature at one point to fact check the distance between two locations mentioned. Other Google Earth features such as timelapse (see “Time Travel” section) and user photos were not employed for the purposes of this interview.
Figure 1. Screenshot of storytelling event using the shared screen function on Zoom where Jose ran Google Earth form his computer to act as a visual memory prompt. Photo by Author.
After the interview, the recording of the video was then transcribed and edited into a short ethnographic film (see “Contributions of Virtual SVG to the Film...” section below). The entire interview lasted 77 minutes, which in retrospect was probably too long for Jose to manage. He was clearly getting tired, and by the end of his interview his speech became slower and more slurred. This is evident in the film.
ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION
Jose began his story by opening Google Earth and manually zooming in to an overhead view of the entire city of San Salvador. After taking a few minutes to orient himself in the city he eventually found his old neighborhood. He began talking about how his family fit into the social sphere of San Salvador, and the reason they had immigrated to the US. Coming from a middle-class family in the wealthy neighborhood of Antiguo Cuscatlán, he recounted spending his evenings accompanying his mother to the City Hall building down the street from his childhood home. He explained the purpose of these visits was twofold: (1) to identify the bodies of the young neighborhood boys who had been killed that day, and (2) to expose Jose to the realities of what could happen if he was not careful in his neighborhood. Only twelve going on thirteen years old at the time, he understood his parent’s fear that he or his three siblings could easily be next. These were early days of the conflict that later became known as the Salvadoran Civil War. He attributes this fear as being the main incentive for his family’s move to the US.
During the interview, Jose used the interactive map to pinpoint locations that allowed him to understand the uprising that surrounded him. Other than City Hall, he was quick to point out the San Salvador Volcano (Figure 2), the largest landmark in the city. Visible from his backyard, this he noted was a site for much of the fighting between the government and rebel forces. He recalled seeing the blasts and smoke from gunfire on the volcano through his windows at night and being instructed to sleep under his bed to avoid any stray bullets that could enter through his window. In the interview he mentions that the volcano was “less than a mile away” from his house, elaborating on the intensity of his proximity to the war. Later using the program’s ruler tool, I found that the base of the mountain was actually closer to five miles away from his home. The clouding of memory coupled with the intensity of war are easy scapegoats for this miscalculated distance but having the immediate tools to verify these types of simple statements made clear how a child would have experienced these events in a heightened way.
Figure 2. Screenshot from the film Origin Trail: San Salvador Volcano, named after its adjacent city, was visible from Jose’s backyard and one of the main locations that tied him to the war. Photo by Author.
The latter half of the interview focused on Jose’s life once he arrived in Chicago and found that it wasn’t everything that he hoped it would be. As he manually scrolled from San Salvador to Chicago (rather than typing in the new destination and letting the program navigate for him) he commented that the move caused him to go from an upper- middle class family in El Salvador to a poor immigrant overnight. This change in status was not obvious from the scenes of his virtual tour of Chicago. The houses he lived in, the school he attended, and the surrounding neighborhoods didn’t appear to be particularly impoverished (from my perspective); it’s only in his retelling of memories of those locations that colored the geography with new light. The first apartment building he lived in upon arrival in Chicago struck me as particularly nice (Figure 3). The large windows of the building led me to imagine a spacious home and its close proximity to Lake Michigan it seem extra appealing. So, I was surprised to learn that he and his siblings were miserable during their first year in the US. It was only once he explained that he was living in a single-bedroom basement apartment that was shared with ten other people did I begin to understand his negative attitude toward life in the US. Between not knowing the language, sleeping on a living room couch with his three siblings (Figure 4), and constantly being threatened at knifepoint by local gangs, it made sense that he would have rather risked being killed in El Salvador than stay in Chicago that first year. He explained that it took him a full decade before he felt comfortable in his new city.
Figure 3. Screenshot from the film Origin Trail: 3D satellite image of Jose’s first home in Chicago where he shared a one-bedroom apartment with 11 people. Photo by Author.
Figure 4. Screenshot from the film Origin Trail: Family photo of Jose and his three siblings sitting on the pull-out sofa that also functioned as their bed for their first ten years in the US. Photo courtesy of Jose Barillas.
Jose’s misery in what was supposed to be the greatest country in the world and fact that he would rather have return to his war-torn country than deal with the daily threats he was receiving at school, challenge the stereotype of Salvadorans being “hostile immigrants” (Penny, 2018) from a “shithole” country (Dawsey, 2018) who are often involved in gang activity (Zaidi, 2019). Sarah Lamb (2001), building on Ruth Behar’s theory on life histories, points out how storytelling is a way of “working out and making sense—often the critiquing—of the broader social and cultural systems ... that impinge on and shape that life” (p.20). In Jose’s case, he constructs himself as an innocent bystander caught in limbo between two identities that would mark him for violence. In El Salvador, he describes the war as being between the rich and poor while he labels his family as middle class, but living in a wealthy neighborhood, “stuck in the middle of the conflict” (J Barillas, Zoom Interview, April 9, 2020). Later during the interview, while examining his high school in Chicago via street view, he recalled an event where he naively sported a jacket that marked him in colors associated with the Latin Kings, a dominant Hispanic gang. In both anecdotes, he challenges the cultural systems inherent to specific locations, which due to his not quite insider/not quite outsider status, make him a potential target for violence.
The combination of Jose’s limited mobility and dexterity, the physical distance between the two of us during the time of the interview, the even greater distance in the locations in his migration, and the travel restrictions in place during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic made Google Earth the perfect choice for a virtually mediated, go- along interview to collect a life story. Had one or more of these obstacles been removed, the narrative could have been captured simply using physical maps or sketch maps, although I doubt they would have provided such a rich telling of the story. Google’s scaling feature allowed Jose to alternate between micro details like the front facade of his family home (Figure 5) to a macro view of the entire Earth that made for easy understanding of the relative distance between San Salvador and Chicago. These locations and their associated images allowed Jose to relive the years of 1981–1982 through the geographic component of space rather than the chronologic organization of time. While his story was still structured with a beginning, middle, and end, the three chapters were centered around place, specifically the three houses of his youth. Without being able to visit the actual sites of these buildings, experiencing them through Google Earth unlocked memories that may not have been as clear without the visual triggers.
Figure 5. Screenshot from the film Origin Trail: street view of Jose’s home in Chicago with view of front door. Representative of the type of coverage of locations in the Global North. Photo by Author.
Toward the end of our interview, I asked Jose if he has any interest in returning to El Salvador. He insisted that he did not. I wondered if this was an honest answer or if it was simpler to eradicate desires than explain that because of his disease he most likely would not be able to even if he wanted to. When pressed, he broke what could have been a hard conversation with levity in stating, “I don’t need to go back there. I can see everything right here on Google Earth.” This line concludes the film, acting as both punchline and unintentional advertisement for the software (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Screenshot from the film Origin Trail: loading page for Google Earth. Still from film over punchline joking about the entire interview being an advertisement for Google Earth. Photo by Author.
More details of Jose’s case study will be interwoven throughout the paper. In the following sections I will attempt to break down the pros and cons of using interactive maps in the collection of oral histories through the theoretical framework of patchwork ethnography.
MERITS OF METHOD
Using virtual SVG methods to collect oral histories benefits not only the production of life history but also diversity among informants in ways that real-world (non-virtual) geonarratives or traditional oral history interviews cannot. This hybrid method I’m calling patchwork geonarrative adds dimensions to ethnographic data in terms of time travel and increases the quality of recalled information, making for a richer story. Its asynchronicity can act as a virtual teleportation device, and Google’s scaling feature allows users to alternate focus between macro and micro locations with ease. The remote accessibility also has the potential to increase diversity of informants by allowing populations with limited physical abilities an affordable way to enter the spaces of their stories, which may otherwise be unfeasible.
Remote Accessibility
If the focus of the narrative is geographically driven, an immersive sensory experience would benefit the stir of memory, as placing the narrator into the locations of their story can produce rich stories (Curtis et al., 2018). But the financial burden of travel required to do a spatial video geonarrative for many immigration biographies can be exorbitant. If price is a limiting factor, interactive maps can allow informants to travel for free from one country to another in a matter of seconds.
This is especially useful in the current global pandemic, where travel is not only limited but a potential health risk. The case study with Jose just happened to fall into the early months of quarantine. Using Google Earth permitted Jose in Chicago and myself in upstate New York to virtually travel together to a wealthy suburb of San Salvador, then to one of the most dangerous high schools in Chicago, without breaking the shelter-in-place guidelines. For these reasons it can be argued that virtual travel (and virtual interviews) are more democratic and inclusive. Accessible to anyone with a computer, internet access, and an ability to navigate an interactive map, Google Earth is a convenient method that further blurs the separation between home and field to which Günel and his colleagues were referring (2020).
Visual Recall As mentioned above, visual aids can assist in the recall of nostalgia, and researchers have experimented with different forms of stimuli (Curtis et al., 2018). But even within the realm of environmentally cued narratives there is variation in the generation of results such that using different geographic methods can produce dramatically different tellings of the same tale. In a 2018 experiment, Curtis et al. had participants first create story maps and recorded their telling of crime-related histories of a particular neighborhood. They later conducted SVGs in the form of drive-by (‘go- along’) interviews of the same neighborhood and found that these second interviews produced longer, richer narratives (Curtis et al., 2018). This experiment illustrated that physically being in the space and experiencing all the sensory details of the location seemed to bring back more vivid memories.
Time Travel
In the event that the story takes place in the distant past and/or the terrain has changed significantly since the time of the story, Google Earth has also a feature that allows access to satellite images of the past (Saxena, 2019). This form of time travel eclipses any real-time go-along interviews where the environment does not reflect the story being told. A war-torn neighborhood of today probably won’t stir the same memories as the vibrant neighborhood of one's youth (or vice versa as in Jose’s case). The timelapse feature, although limited to the last 35 years (“Timelapse,” 2020), can act as a tremendous visual trigger for memory, especially if photographic documentation is limited. This feature was not used in the case study with Jose (see “Coverage” and “Literacy” sections below). Had it been an option and had there been visual evidence of the war (in the form of demolished buildings or bodies on the street), this most likely would have generated a more detailed account of his memories of war.
Scale
Another dimension that interactive maps, like Google Earth, provide that physically visiting the geographic location or using hard copy maps does not is the control of scale. The ability to change scale between global and local views permits participants to place emphasis on any part of their story that they deem significant (Buckle, 2018). In an article Mapping Migration Biographies, Buckle (2018) notes that while it may seem that the international move would have had a more significant impact on a person's life history, she found that in some cases domestic migrations were more significant than their longer distance international journeys. In one example, an informant who was a child when he immigrated from Australia and the UK found a move between houses in Australia more memorable (Buckle, 2018).
For Jose, the entirety of the story spanned almost 3000 miles. Similar to Buckle’s informant, while the move from El Salvador to Chicago was a significant part of his story, full of stress and uncertainty, his move from the one-bedroom apartment in Chicago to a four-bedroom house within the same city received a great deal of focus. Jose attributed this to finally feeling comfortable, stating that the bigger house was “easier to live in.” This is the house he associated most with the word “home.” Had the narrative event only used hard copy paper maps, I most likely would have used a world map to focus on the move from Central to North America. This choice would have prevented us from seeing the nuances between the first and second Chicago houses; the scale of the visual reference would have been fixed to an international viewpoint. As Buckle notes, using virtual maps allows the storyteller to decide scale rather than the cartographer (Buckle, 2018).
Giving Voices to Those with Disabilities
Early advocates of oral history recognized its ability to give voices to the previously voiceless in order to counter dominant narratives by providing a platform for marginalized people to tell their stories and fill in gaps of historic archives (Freund, 2008). This work has been done predominantly for women, minorities, and other oppressed groups. Until recently, it was thought that one needed to be a competent speaker (Goodwin, 2004) or achieve a certain level of intellectual or social competency (Ochs, 2010) in order to be deemed worthy of having a voice. The push from disability studies has created space for persons with disabilities’ voices to be heard (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006; Shakespeare, 2018). Because of the physical limitation of many people with disabilities, which may limit their ability to participate in many other geo-methods (story mapping, go-along interviews, traditional SVG), the method of mixing the collection of oral history with a virtual spatial video geonarrative can be ideal.
Returning to Charles Goodwin’s research (2004) with his aphasic informant, Chil, Jose is similarly able to position himself as a competent communicator despite his limited speaking ability, thanks to the visual components of Google Earth, which aid in his telling of his geographically situated story. Having a visual reference clarified some of his unintelligible slurred speech by providing context clues to guide the listener. This was especially helpful when he was pronouncing the names of specific sites in San Salvador that were unknown to me. One example is the neighborhood in which he lived, Antiguo Cuscatlán. I couldn’t make out what he was saying in speech, but Google Earth had the location name spelled out on screen and Jose circled it with his mouse the first few times he said it. Had this been a strictly oral interview, I would have had to stop to have him repeat the name and clarify that he was talking about a neighborhood. The visual cues prevented the potential for a break in conversation, allowing conversation to flow despite the fact that I didn’t understand the words he was saying.
Virtual SVGs not only help in aiding those with limited speech but are also ideal for interviewing those with physical disabilities. The method was perfectly suited to the unique limitations of our circumstances. Non-virtual methods such as story maps or go-along interviews would not be possible (Curtis et al., 2018) as MSA impairs dexterity, which wouldn’t allow Jose to control the mark making on paper necessary for the story mapping method. Meanwhile, his physical mobility would not allow him to walk down the streets of his stories even if the travel restrictions due to COVID had not been an obstacle. Google Earth’s navigation features allowed him to virtually control the location of his stories (albeit slowly) despite his impairment.
That being said, I recognize that disability is multivarious and what works for some doesn’t work for others. With Jose, this particular configuration of a virtually mediated geonarrative was manageable for the current status of his fine motor skills, speech abilities, and physical mobility. Changes may need to be made to accommodate the specific abilities and limitations of other participants. Safety
This method also works well for those that are not able to visit locations for safety reasons. A refugee or asylum seeker who may not be able to return to their homeland could much more practically use interactive maps to revisit and tell their stories while keeping themselves out of danger. Jose admitted in his interview that he had no interest in ever returning to El Salvador because, despite the fact that a peace treaty had been signed (Golden, 1992), he felt that people were resentful of those that left during the war and he was afraid of being targeted and attacked if he ever was to return.
Capture Methods
Another benefit to this kind of virtual-mediated method, especially if mediated through a program like Zoom, is that it is easy to record the conversation for future use. No mics, windsocks, or expensive digital recorders are needed as the recording capabilities are built into the software. If another software is used that doesn’t have a recording feature, most computers have an option to record screen.
In my case, I went into the interview with the intent of making it into a film. Others may simply use the method as a way to focus on the informant more during the interview without having to look down to take notes. Having a video recording rather than a strict audio recording of the interaction is also helpful when transcribing the interview. Non-verbal data that would be invisible in an audio recording (facial expressions or body language) might offer useful insight in interpreting the interaction. There is also the possibility of using the video to screenshot maps for future publications or future visual ethnographies, or even to use clips in future conference presentations. Either way, the multimedia element of such a method offers endless possibilities.
PITFALLS OF METHOD
The method of using virtual maps in the collection of oral histories as an alternative to real-life SVG interviews, while very convenient in its collapsing of space, economic requirements, and inclusivity to those with limited mobility, does lack certain enriching aspects that can diminish the generation of data. Even if one can manage the added hurdles of accessibility, coverage, and program literacy that may limit usability, the sharing of two locations simultaneously (the real and the virtual) can make it difficult to tap into a fully immersive sensory experience.
Digital Divide
While I mentioned accessibility being the democratic benefit of the method in the previous section, this benefit is dependent upon the participants having access to a computer and reliable internet. As of 2018 there were an estimated 3.8 people in the world that were not connected to the internet (Dreyfuss, 2018). The digital nature of the method may be beneficial to researchers, but without the same tools that act as a point of entry, the desired informants may not be able to participate and a virtually simulated geonarrative may not be possible.
But even with technological access, there are still limitations to being separated by a screen. The distance that a digital interview introduces between narrator and audience further complicates the telling, making it harder to pick up on non-verbal and haptic cues, which typically play an unconscious but critical role in all verbal interactions (Goodwin, 2004). Moreover, these extra-linguistic features of interaction can take on a greater role in social life when people deal with linguistic impairment as we saw with Chil (Goodwin, 2004). While I could see Jose’s facial expressions well enough to pick up on certain non-verbal cues, there were other parts of his body language that might have been missed due to the cropping on the camera. Also, when in shared-screen mode, the video box scales down so small that subtle non-verbal cues could have been very easily overlooked.
Muted Senses
Another key aspect that cannot be recreated in a virtually simulated street-view walk- through is the four other senses that cannot be mediated through a screen (Curtis et al., 2018). Google Earth, for instance, only offers a visual representation, but the smells, sounds, tastes in the air, and temperature associated with a place are not represented. Access to smells during the storytelling events can be especially beneficial, as shown by research on the strong link between scent and memory (Ackerman, 1990). The smell of dog urine mixed with dust and BBQ on a hot day may whisk a storyteller back to their childhood more fully than the sight of a house that was always cooking BBQ on Saturdays.
Distractions
While there is clearly a disadvantage in what is lost through a screened mediation of space, there is also the added distraction of being situated in one's own home while attempting to mentally teleport to the past. It’s hard to fully re-enter memory while being bombarded with sensory reminders of the present. In Jose’s case, we were constantly interrupted by the sounds of the conversations between his wife (my mother) and his son (my brother) from the other room. At one point in the film, you can hear a cell phone with a very recognizably contemporary ringtone, a reminder that we’re no longer in 1981 El Salvador. All these uncontrollable stimuli rushed the interview and broke the connection to the past that we were jointly trying to channel.
Not Public but Not Private
The presence of others within earshot undoubtedly factored into the narrative generated. Whether a topic was avoided, or the story was framed to portray Jose in a particular light, how he wanted me, his wife (my mom), and his son (my brother) to see him, whether consciously or subconsciously, was at play.
Sarah Lamb notes this in her essay Being a Widow and Other Life Stories (2001) on the subject of private versus public conversations and how it can dictate to the utterances performed. Different details will be selected depending on who is present and how the speaker understands their words will be used. In the case with Jose, we were not walking down the streets of San Salvador or Chicago talking about the dangers embedded in particular locations, leaving us free to talk about the disappointments of each location. However, despite the fact that we were outside of public view, the conversation was not entirely private, either. Even if the other family members were not home, the lack of anonymity and the knowledge that the interview was being recorded (and would subsequently be used in a film) eliminated any sense of privacy. Whether or not he did it knowingly, Jose’s utterances were performed with these factors in mind.
Coverage
Another issue that is specific to Google Earth is the coverage available in the viewing options. Jose’s story took place in two locations that had drastically different degrees of data and features availability. Unsurprisingly, there was far less visual data in El Salvador than in Chicago. Street views were completely absent, and only the occasional 360° image had been uploaded by users at tourist destinations, which were not useful in Jose’s narrative. For this reason, the El Salvador portion of his story was solely told through overhead satellite images that were far blurrier than images from Chicago. For instance, the image of his house in San Salvador was so pixelated that the color the house is painted cannot be detected (Figure 7). Meanwhile, the satellite images of Chicago were crisper and had a 3D view option that allows users to dodge around skyscrapers (Figure 3). The street views in Chicago not only allowed us to see the color, but he could zoom in on the front door of his family home (Figure 5).
Figure 7. Screenshot from the film Origin Trail: satellite image of Jose’s childhood home in El Salvador zoomed in as far as it will go (no street view option was available). Representative of the type of coverage in many countries in the global south. Photo by Author.
Google’s coverage tends to favor wealthier nations (“Coverage of Google Street View”, 2010). The contrast in access to visual data between geographic locations might, if used for this method of storytelling, bias recall in favor of the locations with more (or better quality) visual data. This would be especially detrimental to the telling of an immigration story and very possibly factored into the reason why Jose spent more time focusing on his adjustment to Chicago (43 minutes) rather than his experiences of the war in El Salvador (34 minutes) during our interview.
Literacy
Perhaps the most important factor in considering whether or not to use a virtually simulated SVG to conduct an oral history is the level of computer and map literacy of the informant. Even though a person may know an area very well, if they don’t understand how the symbolic representations correlate on the map, it may not produce a very rich narrative (Curtis et al., 2018). In the case study with Jose, who happens to be a retired computer scientist, I was surprised to see that he struggled to navigate through Google Earth after he assured me that he was very familiar with the software. He didn’t seem to know how to navigate the street view feature and often would attempt to find things by navigating from the aerial view rather than typing in the street addresses in the search box, which we had on hand for that very purpose. I wasn't sure if he was struggling due to dexterity or vision issues associated with his disease, or if he just wasn’t as well versed in the program as he had made himself out to be. I would suggest doing a run through with any informant ahead of time to make sure they understand how the software operates.
CONTRIBUTION OF VIRTUAL SVG TO THE FILM, ORIGIN TRAIL
As previously stated, I went into this project with the intent of creating a visual ethnographic film from the footage captured during the interview. Jose had full knowledge of this and consented to the project. The oral history that was collected during our virtually mediated storytelling event was intercut with Jose’s family photos and archival news footage to create a 16-minute film titled Origin Trail (Figure 8) (Craig, 2020) that can be seen here.
Figure 8. Screenshot of title screen of film, Origin Trail. Photo by Author.
The title of the film, Origin Trail, works as a pun for a very specific audience. Not only does it literally refer to the path of one's ancestral roots, it also references the popular computer game from the early 1970s, Oregon Trail (Lussenhop, 2011). For those of my generation (who came of age in the 1980s and 90s) within my particular demographic (middle class, public-school educated American), this was an early introduction to the idea of migration in pursuit of forging a better life and fulfilling the American Dream. Like the characters of the computer game often found, the journey to a new land was more dangerous than promised. Whereas the families of Oregon Trail were faced with threats of cholera and dysentery, the family of Origin Trail faced threats of gang violence and being stabbed if they didn’t turn over the answers to their homework.
The added layer of virtually mediated space told through a mapped journey also created overlap between the two stories. Jose’s journey utilized an interactive program that allowed him to choose where to go and what to focus on in order to relay his tale; similarly, the players of the game use an interactive interface and make a series of choices that affect the outcome of the narrative.
Another parallel between the game and the film is its use as an education tool for the youth. Jose’s two children (my younger siblings) were also interviewed for the film (although not using the same method). They both admitted to having no real knowledge of their father’s immigration story. In the interview with Jose’s children, they were questioned about their knowledge of their father’s transcontinental migration and his subsequent experiences with war. While they were both aware that the war was the impetus for the family to leave El Salvador, both admitted that they didn’t know any of the details. Jose’s son (my brother), 21, seemed to know the least: “I know there was a war, but I don’t know what the war was about.” (C. Barillas, Zoom Interview, April 14, 2020). Jose’s daughter (my sister), 23, had more details but admitted she couldn’t really tap into the full weight of growing up in a war: “...I remember when I was 13, I was obsessed with Orlando Bloom and playing SIMS. I can’t imagine being in the middle of a war zone and like sleeping under my bed because I’m scared of gunshots coming [through] my window...” (A. Barillas, Zoom Interview, April 12, 2020).
To Jose’s children, the threats of danger that he experienced were vague plot points in a distant story, absent of any real trauma. The final film then allows for his children to have a multi-sensory experience that goes beyond a simple oral narrative. Just as Oregon Trail attempts to teach American children about the history (perhaps ‘mythology’ is more accurate) of the western expansion through virtually mediated interactive maps, so does Origin Trail act as an intergenerational storytelling device for children within a single family. The use of maps during the interview allowed Jose to tap into the memories of his own youth, while the maps then depicted in the film allow Jose’s children to have a spatial understanding of their familial history.
In this way Günel’s manifesto of blurring the boundaries of professional and private come into play. While this paper and film were created to be shared publicly and act as the final piece needed to obtain my master’s degree, it was also meant to function privately within my immediate family as a gift to my siblings as they cope with losing their father to a devastating disease.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
As we have seen, this mixed method approach of collecting oral history using interactive maps as visual memory prompts in a spatial video geonarrative is beneficial to both the researcher and the informant but is not without its shortcomings. The method stands to be improved both in advancements in the technology utilized and by experiment with variations on the method. Until now most of the emerging geospatial methods of data collection have been used in the field of geography (Kwan and Ding, 2008) and public health (Curtis et al., 2015) for the purposes of generating quantitative place data. However, as Kwan and Ding suggest (2008), and as I have demonstrated in the case study provided, which expands upon their ideas by adding a virtual component, this method could very well benefit qualitative research in the field of anthropology, especially in the collection of oral history or ethnography. It’s also advantageous to think about how this type of method might be used outside of the realm of academia.
The subject of the case study was an immigrant as well as a person with disabilities, which made the specific configuration of the method ideal for the kind of story we were hoping to capture: an immigration autobiography. The distance the story covers would make it both physically and financially impossible for Jose to attempt a traditional SVG that would allow him to interact with the real-life geographic locations in his story. For this reason, the physically impaired, the elderly, or those whose safety may be jeopardized from real-life visits could also benefit from a virtual geonarrative. This could be equally as useful in situations in which it’s not the physical space that is dangerous, but the words spoken; virtual travel would allow for more privacy even if navigating right outside of the informant’s door.
In the event that Google Earth improves its coverage in the Global South, or another software comes along that surpasses its capabilities, this method would be valuable not only for social scientists to collect life stories, but also for professions outside of academia. Immigration lawyers that may need their client to talk about the traumas faced in their home countries could benefit from using a virtual mediated map to acquire the necessary details to create stronger cases for granting visas. This would be especially pertinent in cases concerning refugees or those seeking asylum. Curtis et al. pointed out a more localized application of such a method by working with ex-convicts to understand crime habits within a particular neighborhood and describes how such a method could help law enforcement or community safety organizations fill in the gaps of the official police records in underreported areas (Curtis et al., 2018).
Another site of expansion for this method could be to circle back and improve the original technology used by making the resulting SVGs accessible to the public via Google Earth. By this I mean that Google could incorporate a story map feature that allows users to upload content associated with that particular location to their mapping platform, which would be accessible to other users, similar to the 360° view feature. Imagine exploring a location on Google Earth and having the option to click on an audio clip that plays an excerpt from an interview talking about a particular apartment building. That clip could then be linked to the full interview, story map, research paper, or film that was created as a final product from the geonarrative. A link to this paper or its supplementary film could be added to the various locations mentioned in Jose’s story. Imagine if Jose’s story was just one of many options available to view when you look up San Salvador Volcano, Lake View High School, or the addresses of any of the three houses he lived in. What if an entire history of his house in El Salvador were available on Google Earth, following a timeline of all of its residents? Whoever lives there now could have access to Jose’s story and see how their home played into not just one family’s history but the country's.
Hart (2020) suggests similar uses of the platform in the form of audioscapes that would make the virtually mediated exploration that much richer of a sensory experience (also see Butler, 2008). Adding personal stories of experiences to space adds history and perspective to a geographic location. If available to all users, it would allow not only locals, but recent transplants, expats, and tourists to comment on their experiences of a particular geographic location and collect over time. A multivocal collection of stories like this could push “back against singular place narratives and [produce]...decentralized, and inclusive versions of heritage” (Hart, 2020 p.6; also see Purkis, 2017).
The method I have presented in this paper grew from constraints of necessity and offers new forms of conducting oral history interviews. This method incorporates geographically based visual prompting that often produces richly detailed narratives and is more inclusive than what is permitted by traditional face-to-face interviews. This approach fits neatly into Günel et al.’s (2020) manifesto, which states that patchwork ethnography is “fully attending to how changing living and working conditions are profoundly and irrevocably changing knowledge production.” By opening up both methods of virtual fieldwork as well as opportunities for informant participation, new forms of knowledge are sure to emerge. With these advantages in mind, researchers should consider the range of limitations before settling on such a method. The inherent divide caused by a screen- mediated interaction inhibits users from being able to read non-verbal cues and mutes their senses. The burden of distraction and coverage also need to be managed, as well as the hurdles of accessibility and program literacy that would have to be overcome before a virtually mediated spatial video geonarrative could be attempted.
At this time, no one knows when things are expected to go back to normal or when face-to-face interviews will be safe again, but the recent barriers have created an opportunity for us to reconsider how research might be done virtually. Remaining physically stationary doesn’t necessarily have to limit our travel. I hope to see more anthropologists take advantage of the developments of virtual geo-spatial technology and incorporate some of the methods that cultural geographers are using into our own practices. APPENDIX List of Interview Questions
What year did your family immigrate to the US and how old were you?
was happening in El Salvador when your family finally decided to leave?
Can you remember seeing any evidence of the war in the streets?
Do you have any memories you would like to share?
How did you parents talk about the move with you and your siblings?
What was happening on TV?
Describe your neighborhood/your last house before you left?
Do you remember what you imagined your life in the US would be like?
Did it meet your expectations?
Describe the move to the US.
What were the days like leading up to the move?
Packing?
Saying goodbye?
Talk about the actual commute to Chicago?
Where did you stay the first night?
Why did your family decide to move to the US?
Why Chicago?
Were you considered a refugee/asylum seeker?
What was your visa status?
Describe your first home in Chicago.
What was the neighborhood like?
Talk about what adjusting to life in the US was like.
School
Home
Social world
Describe your relationship to El Salvador now.
Have you ever returned?
If you went back now what would you want to see?
Which place that you have lived feels the most like “home” to you now?
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