built a stylized map of the three main trips from On the Road - mainly for myself, but thought others might like it.
You can click on the different journeys in the legend (I, II, III) to highlight each of the routes across the country. Hovering over the stops will bring up a relevant quote and date from that part of the story.
(I'm a novice here and my posts keep going haywire, so apologies for that!)
I think this is a promising, very good first step. As the Laozi records, 千里之行，始於足下 or "a journey of a thousand miles begins beneath your feet" (DDJ 64).
But, not to discourage you, rather to encourage you and 'dream big', I think you should do much more, as this is a great idea. Here's an example of what I hope you could expand this into: The Travels of Master Changchun. (It's a site maintained by Oxford University Press for the translation of 長春真人西遊記 or Daoist Master Changchun's Journey to the West, an account of the great Daoist teacher who was summoned to the camp of Genghis Khan in Central Asia. You have interactive maps (from Google Earth) and articles about the various places. If you could also flesh this out with articles about each place, details of what it was like, and longer quotes, I think it could turn into a real resource used in English departments in high schools and universities the world over. You can find their website here.
wow - thank you for sharing this! It's really an incredible and beautiful body of work. I hadn't even thought of this as a potential destination but it is inspiring to see how complete and evocative a digital artifact can become. I plan to continue iterating and developing this for Kerouac, and this is a remarkable piece to aspire towards. Thanks again!
You're welcome! And I agree (of course) that that is a beautiful website, and I think you have such a great idea (Why didn't I think of it? Oh, right, because I have no experience in website design! D'oh!) that I think you should really pursue it, especially since Kerouac is part of so many more curriculums than Changchun!
I wish you the best of luck!
Love this! On the road fan and cartographer here. Well done