For this project, I created a reference map of all the New York City locations mentioned in Pai Hsien-Yung’s short story collection “New Yorkers”, where as each location marker on the map is selected, the relevant quote from the book will be displayed on the side.
Pai Hsien-Yung and New York
Pai Hsien-Yung’s work in “New Yorkers”, penned between 1965 and 2003, offers a poignant exploration of the lives of Chinese individuals navigating their new lives in the foreign city. Pai Hsien-Yung’s work serves as a cultural and historical artifact as the stories explore themes such as displacement, cultural tension, and identity amidst the ongoing tussle between Chinese traditions and Western influence. Due to a number of political and cultural reasons, despite the valuable insight it provides, “New Yorkers” remains relatively underrecognized, particularly among the newer generations of Mainland Chinese navigating their own realities in the city—which, in my personal view, is such a shame, as members of the community might very well find that Pai’s work often mirrors their own experiences.
Hence, I want to use this project as a way to bridge that gap. This map is a part of a larger project I hope to finish in the future. It provides a geographical reference to all the NYC locations in the book and displays the chapter where the location appears as well as the relevant quotes.
As I integrate the map with other data and continue to develop the interaction design, my ultimate goal aims at connecting Pai’s narratives with contemporary digital footprints — a map where clicking on any marked NYC location displays quotes from Pai’s stories and current social media posts relating to the location, creating a parallel between the past with the present realities shared on social media.
Making of the Map
Gathering the Data
The data for this map was compiled manually. l went through each story in “New Yorkers.” I pinpointed each mentioned NYC location, extracted relevant text segments, and collected geospatial data via Google Maps. As the stories were published separately over nearly four decades before being put together for the short story collection and there is no English version of the book itself, the English translation of each story exists in different sources. With the help of my old comparative lit professor, I was able to find a list of all the translated works of Pai and spent a very long time searching for the actual text of these listed journals. I wasn’t able to get my hands on the translation of one of the six stories called ‘Nocturne’, as the translated version was only published in the summer 1980 edition of “the Chinese PEN”, a Taiwanese journal that I just couldn’t find a digital copy of. So I resorted to translating the quote myself.
Preparing the Data
The structure of the data is more complex than can fit in a single sheet, as each location can be mentioned in multiple chapters, and each chapter can have multiple quotes. To manage this, I created multiple tables according to the relationships between entities—chapters, locations, and quotes—and then joined these tables in Tableau. This setup allowed for a dynamic interaction where users can click on a location and see the associated quotes from the book, organized by chapters. From there, I was able to create the map in Tableau and use the map as a filter to display relevant texts.
Reflection
The current map display could use some usability improvements. First of all, I am not very satisfied with the way the text is displayed on the side menu. I added text wrap for both the English and Chinese texts, but the text wrap does not seem to be working on the Chinese text, so only one line of the Chinese quote is displayed.
I am also hoping to add chapter names in the sidebar along with the quote display and add hyperlinked chapter sources. Since accessing the english translation was so time-consuming for me, it would be helpful to add the references and directly link to the source so users can read the full english translations of the relevant stories.
Additionally, the data preparation process with actual prose can be a little hairy. For example, some locations are only mentioned in passing in the stories and I had to make a decision whether to include it in the map. There were also occasions where many locations are mentioned in a single sentence, but the current data structure is set up to have each unique quote relating to a single location, so I had to break up the quote length which compromised how informative the quotes are. Going further, I will consider changing the structure of the data and re-editing the quotes’ content to make sure that my audience can get a better sense of the scene and setting from the excerpt.