The urban world of Brazilian modernists

My project is on literary and visual representations of São Paulo in Brazilian Modernism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ideally, and ambitiously, I would like to combine mapping and text mining to cross-reference historical maps of the city with contemporary literary and visual works that mention specific sites, streets, buildings, etc. Clicking or hovering over a location would bring up, for example, a “pop-up” list of the books, poems, and other writings that mention this site (maybe a little rectangle with hypertext in it). One could then click on any item on the list to access the page(s) where the location is mentioned, and from there read the whole work. This would also be the case with paintings and prints. Each “pop-up” list of works could also contain thumbnails of historical photographs and illustrations to give the viewer an idea of what that street looked like at the time. And the viewer could also do this the other way around–when reading a novel, or short story, the textual mention to a location would link to the city map and bring up historical images. (This is the part that would require text mining.) There could be two or three different historical maps overlaid–the 1920s, the 1930s, and a contemporary map–so this project would also trace the transformation of the city over time, highlighting what is left and what disappeared from the urban world evoked by Modernists in the early 20th century. I wonder if I can transform this project into a smaller, more feasible task for the duration of our institute.

 

Source: The urban world of Brazilian modernists