Senghor on the Rocks: Christoph Benda
Title: Senghor on the Rocks
URL: http://www.senghorontherocks.net/part1.html
Senghor on the Rocks (SOTR) was published online under a creative commons license as the
first novel illustrated with Google Maps. Every page of the virtual book that was created for the
online presentation of the novel is accompanied by a satellite view of the current location of the
story. Readers experience the novel’s action as a journey on the map, including smooth panning
from location to location as the characters travel around or different zoom levels showing areas
in close detail or as an overview.
The novel itself is written in German and deals with an involuntary journey of young assistant
cameraman Martin “Chi” Tschirner taking him through Dakar and the Senegal. In the first
chapters Chi is busy shooting a promotional film in Dakar and does not care too much about
where he is or what the city he is hurrying through may be like – other than loud, dirty and
inscrutable. Chi doesn’t like his job or the people he works with too much and the routines of his
work prevent him from seeing the world instead of a series of changing locations requiring
different light filters and lenses. The story takes its turn as Chi loses his job for sleeping with the
producers lover and – deprived of the camera that normally shields him – finds himself
defencelessly sucked in to the foreign and vivid city of Dakar.
SOTR was written in the form of a classical novel well before its current format was developed.
But because of its linear narrative structure, the consistent first‐person perspective and the
movement that happens throughout the text, it was very well suited for an adaption as an online
"geo‐novel". The text hardly was changed for the online version, but every scene has been
geographically referenced and the chapter structure has been adjusted for online reading habits.
In this respect the project may be substantially different from other e‐literature projects because
the conception and writing of the text was not driven by the possibilities of an electronic
presentation format.
One part of the projected presentation will be a reading of a chapter of SOTR featuring
interesting map views and several changes of locations. A beamer and PC with internet
connection would be sufficient for displaying the pages and maps in question during the reading.
Listeners would then be able to see the maps while they can listen to the text describing the
action taking place.
As not too many of the participants may be German speaking we would like to keep a good part
of the presentation open for a discussion in English. A short statement of the author may open a
discussion on a topic that may be relevant for other authors as well: How does the use of
information layers that are beyond writing such as maps affect the creative processes of reading information layers that are beyond writing such as maps affectand writing. A point to start from could
be the question, if a map does enhance the realism or the fictitious character of a novel.