Although I have to produce the physical book for this assignment (I am currently awaiting some book binding materials and tools that will be helpful) I have been giving more thought to how I deal with the map that is to go on the reverse of the photos.
The original intention was to make this up from an Ordnance Survey map. While working on the dimensions of the book (I am intending the images to be A5) it quickly became apparent that this is not going to work. The problem is largely one of scale. The ratio of the physical length of the series of photos to their height is 17:1. Looking at the map though the ratio from the start point to the end is more like 17:3; the distance between the start and finish points, a straight line from west to east, is about 17 miles but the distance between the southernmost point on the route, the start point at Stocksfield, and the northernmost point, Clara Vale roughly half way between Wylam and Blaydon, is three miles. The numbers simply do not fit the format of the book! I have looked at a number of other possibilities but none of them work particularly well. One is simply to distort the map to straighten out the train line. This just looks odd. Another is to make a sort of mosaic made up of twelve panels that each show a section of the line and fit the 17:1 ratio. This though looks very disjointed and does not give a sense of the continuous journey.
I have therefore been looking at a more schematic approach and have been confirmed in my thoughts that this should be better by looking again at the two books I have mentioned in connection with Exercise 5.5. I have been thinking along the lines of train network and route maps (think the London Underground map) that do not contain any reliable geographical information but merely show which station is followed by which when travelling along the line. Northern Railway, our local train company, have a very simple, purely linear, schematic map showing the stations along the line. This I think can form the basis for the book’s map, but to make it more interesting, and tie it more closely to the geographical realities of the journey, I intend to include, at the appropriate points in relation to the stations, some of the places of interest along the way, that are either referred to in the photographs, or are otherwise of local significance. Not least it needs to give an indication of the river and of the bridges over it. I am currently playing around with a few ideas but at the moment I think this is going to have to be hand drawn, at least for the purposes of this initial mock-up. Depending on how well that comes out, it might of course be necessary to come up with something more refined if the book was ever to be produced as something more than an experiment. More on this anon.
Molitor, C, (2015). Sonorama. Listening to the view from the train. Axminster: Uniformbooks
Stenger, S, (2014). Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland. Newcastle: AV Festival
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 