I recently heard about Google Lit Trips, so I went to take a look. Created by teacher Jerome Burg, it’s a way to combine the un-multimedia experience of reading with the uber-multimedia experience of Google Earth. For an excellent description of how Google Lit Trips works, see “Google Lit Trips: Bringing Travel Tales to Life.”
The first trip I “took” was Voltaire’s Candide, whose eponymous protagonist (that’s a mouthful) travels from Europe to South America to Turkey. It was fun to see the trajectory of his journey and there were many resources, such as ancient maps, that I could look at. But rather than poring over all this stuff online, what the lit trip really made me want to do was read Candide.
I bought the English-language Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition a couple of years ago because I loved the cover and hadn’t read the book. (I always feel as though I’m being lazy if I read a French book in English, especially when I need to keep up my French.) Despite the language un-barrier, as soon as I got off the computer, I pulled my Candide off the shelf and it’s now in the queue.
On the plus side, I’ll be reading Candide soon. On the minus side, I can’t help but have an uncomfortably Luddite reaction against the whole idea of Google Lit Trips because fiction is supposed to be internal not external. In very broad outlines, film is a visual medium, the beauty of drama is its spoken language, and fiction is just the reader and the words. Google Lit Trips takes the images the author is trying to paint in your head and replaces (augments?) them with real-life images.
Everyone is trying these days to attract the techy next generation to reading, or to lure those busy gaming and tweeting back to the fold. But is the beauty of fiction the fact that you don’t have to be bothered by the real world for a little while?
LINKS:
- Voltaire’s Candide (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
- Google Lit Trips