StoryMap:
Mina Loy & F. T. Marinetti

By Kenneth Estrada, English MA

Duquesne University

Mina Loy & F.T. Marinetti: Geographic Storymap is a two-person “biography” that traces the life story of Italian Futurist F. T. Marinetti, a person who influenced and interacted with Loy, and that also traces Loy’s life during, or approximately during those same years. The best way I found to segment and correspond each writer’s life years was to group the years by theme without sacrificing chronology, similar to how the Burke biography does with Loy. The user will begin in a place relevant to Marinetti and then switch over to Mina Loy’s life during those same years, if not at whatever point is relevant for Loy (So if the first slide is Marinetti’s birth and education years, Loy’s slide will also be about her birth and education years, etc.).

After looking through other Knightlab tools (of which Storymap is one) and other story-telling tools, I decided that the format of Storymap offered the best medium for giving a dynamic representation of Marinetti and Loy’s life. A two-person timeline, while perfect for following parallel processes, does not have the space for information, and multiple pictures and links to other sites or locations—all of which fit more nicely in the vertical scrolling window of the Storymap tool. The tool allows for the easy placing of any quantity of information in two ways:

  1. For any new or missing information found, that information can simply be added and adjusted into whichever theme or group-of-years window it corresponds to;
  2. If the information does not correspond as harmoniously as one would like, a brand-new slide can be created and placed wherever it is needed in the slide sequence. The information can be added and adjusted to the new slide to both transition seamlessly in between slides and to transition between themes and years.