Ceremony Earth

Digitizing Silko's Novel for Students of the Twenty-first Century

You pointed out a very important dimension of the land and the Pueblo people's relation to the land when you said it was as if the land was telling the stories in the novel. That is it exactly, but it is so difficult to convey mis relationship without sounding like Margaret Fuller or some other Transcendentalist. When I was writing Ceremony I was so terribly devastated by being away from the Laguna country that the writing was my way of re- making the place, the Laguna, country, for myself.

Leslie Marmon Silko, The Delicacy and Strength of Lace

Many students I have taught, especially those who are non-Native, get frustrated when they read Leslie Silko's canonical Native American novel, Ceremony. Not only do they struggle with Silko's disruptions of linear temporality and her collapsing of binary oppositions, but tiiey also struggle with the novel's geographic and cultural location, which is wholly unfamiliar to most of them; because the novel takes place on die Laguna Pueblo in west-central New Mexico, students have trouble understanding the unfamiliar landscape, cosmology, and social conventions integral to the narrative. To help students better understand the novel, I offer them a variety of multimedia artifacts, including video, audio, static images, 360-degree panoramas, and traditional texts. Because Ceremony is so integrally connected with landscape and location, I use Keyhole Markup Language (KML) to attach these artifacts to specific geographic locations - using longitude and latitude - that correspond to places and events in Ceremony. Students open these files - which I have collectively called Ceremony Earth - in any geobrowser, the most popular of which is Google Earth.1 Students then either follow a predefined tour or navigate to a specific geographic point, open the digital contextual material located there, and read, watch, listen to, experience, and interpret the background information designed to help them better understand the whole of Silko's story.

In this essay I will provide background and context for this location-based multimedia project, including reasons why digital literary artifacts attached to specific geographic points on geobrowsers are so appropriate for teaching Ceremony. In doing so, I will investigate the Puebloan webs of meaning inherent in Ceremony's spatial organization, all of which originate in the location-based discourse of Laguna cultural conventions. I will try to always stay aware of my position as a non-Native academic with largely northern European roots, and the inevitable concomitant postcolonial exigencies that go with my positionality.

Treating digital pedagogy as a mash-up (a mix of different elements), I will also discuss students' development of a secondary literacy as they learn about the protagonist, Tayo - a returning World War II POW who painfully survived the Bataan Death March and suffers from what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) - and his reconnection with the landscape, which plays an essential role in his process of healing. After describing the purpose and function of geobrowsers in general and Google Earth in particular, I will lay down some of the structural building blocks upon which Ceremony Earth has been designed and constructed, including an overview of KML. Finally, in order to give readers an idea of how Google Earth can be used as a pedagogical tool for a literature class, I will provide an overview of the materials available on Ceremony Earth.

WEBS OF CONNECTION

Beyond the fact that Ceremony is a difficult novel set in an unfamiliar culture, why should we choose it as the subject of a critically constructed, multimedia set of pedagogical materials? After all, students and scholars read many difficult, unfamiliar novels. Why is this one more important? As it turns out, Ceremony lends itself well to Internet application because of the structure and style of Silko's writing. From her use of prose, poetry, and photography in Storyteller (1981) - in which the arrangement of the photographs suggests the circular design of oral tradition (Hirsch 2) - to her nonlinear construction of temporality and characterization in Ceremony (Bell 47), Silko constantly tries to transgress the limitations of paper-based materials. As James Ruppert notes, Silko successfully constructs a transcendent Ceremony "approximating] a holistic vision close to the Laguna experience of the world and oral tradition" (81). Since Silko recognizes the value of holistic interpretation, apart from the limited understanding granted through linear analysis, her works provide abundant opportunities for inter-, extra-, hyper-, and contextual exploration.

Ceremony also serves as an appropriate subject of digital exploration, because Silko's explanations of Pueblo storytelling perfectly forecast in 1981 the then-unknown structure and function of the Internet. To cite the most obvious parallel, she uses the metaphor of the spiderweb to characterize the construction and organization of Laguna stories. Rather than narrating events and descriptions along a linear timeline emphasizing cause-and-effect relationships, Laguna storytellers, including Silko, weave together seemingly disparate elements while jumping back and forth in place and time. Laguna stories, like contemporary North American digital culture, act like mash-ups because they integrate materials from many different sources, constructing a narrative that lies beyond many of the linear constraints of time and space.

Consequently, geobrowsers and the Internet provide the perfect medium for a nonlinear, location -based, multimedia critical analysis of Ceremony because, as Silko notes when explaining Pueblo storytelling, "as with the [spider's] web, the structure will emerge as it is made, and you must simply listen and trust, as the Pueblo people do, that meaning will be made" ("Language" 2). Indeed, when Silko calls a member of her authence for Ceremony a "listener-reader" (Coltelli 141), she asks her readers to employ the same sort of interactive agency they enjoy as they navigate a geobrowser; as in the case of an oral performance, the text changes with each reading - depending on the context and interpretation - and meaning and structure emerge as the visitor negotiates the geobrowser landscape and accesses the digital contextual materials.

THE VALUE OF MULTIMEDIA PEDAGOGICAL TOOLS

Those digital contextual materials offer students the ability to synthesize widely divergent data across multiple datasets. In their collection titled The Dialogic Classroom: Teachers Integrating Computer Technology, Pedagogy, and Research, Jeffrey Galin and Joan Latchaw explore the advantages of using web-based, multimedia educational tools. Because the web transcends many of the constraints of traditional classroom materials, the authors contend, it encourages holistic problem solving because it "cuts across traditional boundaries, merging, for instance, the library, classroom, and movie theater by providing an ideal environment for associating disparate bits of information, a skill that often eludes students" (49). Reinforcing the advantages of synthesis, Andy Hoffman of Education Week claimed in November 2008 that the convergence of pedagogical possibilities realized on die Internet presages education in the future: "Digital education is a Google 'mash-up,' combining data from more than one source into a single integrated tool. . . . Educational mash-ups will define the classroom of the future, and right now, people are wiring a colossal learning mash-up."

Similarly, Joan Huntley and Joan Latchaw believe that the Internet fosters students' critical-thinking skills because digital tools in these nonlinear, exploratory environments "encourage students to find their own answers, construct further questions, and offer new insights. Thus a particular type of critical thinking (analogical, relational) is being promoted." Not only does the linking function of geobrowsers and the Internet allow students to navigate through diverse multimedia materials, various points of view, and divergent nodes of thought, but the geobrowser usually requires students to make successive interactive navigational choices;2 in other words, students control their own explorations for meaning.

Because students explore at their own pace and follow their own path, they eventually develop what Stuart Moulthrop calls a secondary literacy. This secondary literacy - as compared to the primary literacies of listening, speaking, reading, and writing - requires a more sophisticated and creative recognition of hermeneutics, the study of interpretation: "Hypertext rhetoric must take into account more than just the ordering of language into structures and genres inherited from orality or print literacy. It must also address a more complicated meta-management in which the user modifies ordering processes themselves ... a secondary literacy" (qtd. in Rosenberg 9).

When given the opportunity, students can begin to understand the patterns and relationships inherent in any web of information. As they learn to recognize the connections within and between these patterns and relationships - as they learn to synthesize the incoming information - students begin to formulate creative, complex ideas; seek their own answers; and share unconventional skill sets. As Galin and Latchaw point out, the web provides the best medium yet for encouraging such a positive and effective educational experience: "With its multiple cross-links and references, hypertext is an ideal environment for preventing cognitive overload, supporting student- centered learning, and encouraging associative thinking" (49). In effect, hypertext in the medium of a geobrowser requires students to make interactive navigational choices - students control their own explorations for meaning. Consequently, as students refine their skills in secondary literacy they learn about the novel in a manner unattainable through traditional textual materials.

CYCLIC DESIGNS AND CONTINUUM

Most readers of Ceremony, having grown up outside of New Mexico and thus unfamiliar with the novel's temporal, spatial, and epistemologica! representations, may not understand Silko's innumerable references to Indigenous culture. However, because hundreds of critical articles on the novel have been published in academic journals since the publication of Ceremony in 1977, students and scholars have long had a variety of topics, styles, and methods of analysis from which to choose when exploring Silko's work. Although I offer Ceremony Earth as a source of supplementary information to the wide body of extant Silko material, Ceremony Earth does offer spatial, visual, and audial information that traditional text cannot replicate.

As an example of an important thread within Silko criticism that also ties in directly with my motivation to employ geobrowsers as pedagogical tools, Silko's non-Western timeline, as well as her hybridized spiritual, emotional, and geographical landscapes, fundamentally underlie many misunderstandings about the novel; in fact, when I teach Ceremony my students often comment on their difficulty with the narrative because of the confusing jumps and gaps in time and space. Because Silko's incorporation of nonlinear time and space into the narrative of Ceremony confuses readers, many critics have attempted to clarify her spatiotemporal motivation and method. When Silko explains to the non-Native authence that "the structure of Pueblo expression resembles something like a spider's web - with many little threads radiating from a center, crisscrossing each other" ("Language" 52), she offers a reason why a character's geographical location may suddenly change in midthought by thousands of miles (e.g., Tayo's sudden transference to the Bataan Death March after he has already returned to the Laguna Pueblo). The metaphor of the spiderweb might also explain why a character's temporal orientation can unexpectedly shift by many years (e.g., Tayo's frequent postwar flashbacks to prewar scenes with Uncle Josiah). Paula Gunn Allen calls this nonlinear movement "ceremonial time," in which "events are structured in a way that emphasizes the motion inherent in the interplay of person and event" (148).

The time shifts Silko employs disorient many first-time readers of Ceremony who are more accustomed to linear timelines that include a past, present, and future all moving along in one direction. Moreover, while Silko is disrupting our temporal understanding of Tayo's story, she simultaneously distorts our spatial understanding. Because Silko challenges our preconceived notions of time and space, geobrowsers, which transcend these traditional temporal and spatial limitations and allow the user to navigate to any portion of the globe in seconds, offer a useful tool for understanding Tayo's confusing narrative.

Robert C. Bell, who published the "first important examination of the novel's symbolic circular pattern and tripartite structure" (DiNome 240) in the American Indian Quarterly symposium issue of 1979, focuses on the hoop transformation rite at the midpoint of the story. Emphasizing the repetitive, cyclical patterns of Tayo's journey to health with its concurrent reiterations of myth and ritual, Bell explores Silko's nonlinear representation of events: "Through repetition and recapitulation, the novel itself describes a circular design going into and out of the hoop ceremony at the center of the book ....This figurai design breaks down the very notion of past, present, and future" (49).

Other critics have also investigated the relationship between the nonlinear nature of Silko's narrative and Laguna representations of cyclical time. While ranging wider than Bell in topic and territory, Louis Owens identifies the spatiotemporal significance of the hoop ceremony and claims diat "with the circle of the hoop, Silko suggests the continuum, the cosmos, the Native American of time and space and wholeness" (176-77). Owens uses the physical and textual example of the hoop - a visual, literal circle representing the infinite interconnection of all things, including time - to illustrate his notion of Ceremony as a "remembering, a putting together of past, present, and future into a coherent fabric of timeless identity" (167).

EXPLORING AND EXPLOITING THE LAGUNA LANDSCAPE

Laurie Piper makes this move beyond linearity explicit when she emphasizes the importance of landscape and spatiality in the novel: "Ceremony necessitates the reader's reorientation from a textbased reading to a spatially organized reading" (487). As Piper sees it, those who approach the novel from a geographical and spatial understanding will better understand the underlying story. Reinforcing Piper's notions of spatial understanding, Robert Nelson, former editor of Studies in American Indian Literatures and a wellknown Silko critic, points to the importance of comprehending the landscape of the Laguna: "We do not have to know, in advance of reading the novel, the special patterns of thought that characterize Laguna thinking; it is enough to know only how the land itself is configured in order to gain access into the world of the novel" (13).

Indeed, the land itself is integral to the story of Tayo and his ceremony of healing. Because, as Gunn Allen points out, "Tayo's illness is a result of separation from the ancient unity of person with land, and his healing is a result of a recognition of this oneness" (234), those who read the novel will better understand its messages if they have some understanding of the Laguna landscape.

Despite the unique opportunity, however, that Ceremony and Ceremony Earth offer for thematically oriented explorations of the Laguna landscape, readers and users must understand and engage critically with the exploitation that has long occurred on those sacred lands. From the tragedy of the Jackpile uranium mine, located a few miles north of Old Laguna on the way to Paguate, to the less tragic - but no less destructive - mining, logging, and other uses of the land that take place elsewhere in die novel and in real life, readers should understand the power dynamics that happen outside our purview. As Sharon Holm reminds us, we must be always already vigilant of historical socioeconomic realities, competing and contradictory ideologies, and their cumulative effects upon Native sovereignty:

While critics assert the undeniable and resilient spiritual relationship that the Laguna enjoy with their land as well as their unbroken physical proximity to it, irrevocable socioeconomic and geophysical changes determined by the emerging ideologies of late capitalism in the form of mining and logging operations in the novel are the tensions that botii underpin and unsettle the view of the land and Silko's visions of Native sovereignty in the text. (246)

Remaining respectful of differing cultural mores and expectations, those who read Ceremony can seek more complex answers to humans' relationship with the land than die simple "one with nature" paradigm that offers an illusory solution to the intractable problems that confront people today. As I will explore in the next section, while Ceremony Earth may help readers better understand the Laguna landscape, these digital tools can be misused and ultimately damaging. Consequently, I have been careful to remain respectful of Laguna privacy and Laguna sovereignty: the photographs and videos I offer on Ceremony Earth have either been previously published and are publicly available (e.g., through the US Library of Congress), or those materials have been recorded off pueblo lands.

GEOBROWSERS AND GOOGLE EARTH

Now that I have provided an overview of how and why students can, in theory, benefit from exploring spatially oriented pedagogical materials for Silko's Ceremony - keeping in mind the always already danger of exploitation and colonialism inherent in any presentation of Native beliefs by an outsider such as myself - I will next explain geobrowsers in general using Google Earth as one example. Finally, I demonstrate the potential of Ceremony Earth, pointing to specific applications of regular and panoramic photography, videos, historical maps, textual explanations, and recorded tours.

Within the last several years, a number of new applications, generally called geobrowsers, have appeared. These geobrowsers, including Google Earth, Google Maps, Bing Maps (formerly Microsoft Virtual Earth), NASA World Wind, and ArcGIS Explorer access satellite and aerial imagery and represent that imagery on two- and three-dimensional depictions of the globe. Because geobrowsers display georeferenced3 materials in two- or three-dimensional environments, because they are free, and because they can be embedded in other web applications (like traditional web browsers), geobrowsers "have attracted millions of users amongst the general public, who are seduced by the ease with which they can zoom from space right down to street level" (Sandvik 4).

Because Google Earth (see fig. 1), one of the more popular and widely used geobrowsers, is described as a "virtual globe, map and geographic information program" ("Google") that offers users the opportunity to navigate spatially in 2D and 3D computer environments, it presents a geospatial platform from which to carry out a number of multimedia, spatially oriented tasks. Because users can attach digital data to specific geographic points, Google Earth provides a unique teaching tool for students reading novels set in unfamiliar locations or cultures. Beyond a simple textual description or photograph, Google Earth "maps the Earth by the superimposition of images obtained from satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS 3D globe" ("Google"). Upon this geospatial platform, Google Earth then permits users to attach their own photos, videos, audio, and other digital data using KML.

In addition to allowing users to attach their own materials to specific geographic points, Google Earth allows users to record and share guided tours. Using the "Record Tour" function in Google Earth, users can record their "flights" across the landscape as well as their access to various digital contextual materials, such as photos, movies, and recordings. By including voice-over commentary in their tours, users can construct a narrative - which might provide a compelling reason for exploring the materials - by describing the relevance and details of each place and each component.

KEYHOLE MARKUP LANGUAGE

Although most functions of Google Earth that would be needed by those teaching a novel - including embedding photographs, videos, audio, text, and recorded tours - are relatively easily performed by clicking a few icons in the free version of the Google Earth application, users and designers would benefit from understanding KML, the markup language that manipulates Google Earth and other standards-compliant geobrowsers. Originally developed by Keyhole, Inc.4 and named after the military reconnaissance satellite system originally launched in 1976 ("Marble"), KML is a schema designed "for expressing geographic annotation and visualization" (Wilson); an international standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC); an XML-based language; open-source; and designed to work with "existing and future web-based online and mobile maps (2d) and earth browsers (3d)" (Wilson), including Google Earth.

In short, "KML encodes what to show in a [geo] browser, and how to show it" (Wilson). When users click the icons on the user interface of Google Earth, KML is the code that the application writes. To ensure adequate distribution, KML documents and their related images "may be compressed using the ZIP format into KMZ archives [that can be] shared by e-mail, hosted locally for sharing within a private Internet, or hosted on a web server" (Wilson). Because KML can be so easily compressed and distributed, and because Google Earth and KML can be embedded in other web applications - including traditional web browsers - a large potential authence exists who might want to participate in spatially oriented explorations of literature and related topics.

To their credit, Google offers a plethora of educational materials for learning KML, most in a variety of multimedia formats.5 Moreover, similar to HTML, with which many people are familiar, "KML uses a tag-based structure with nested elements and attributes" (Wilson). Unlike HTML, however, KML is based on the XML standard, which means that developers can attach robust metadata to their materials. That metadata can include anything from defining the subject of the materials - in terms of who, what, when, where, why, and how - to identifying who recorded the data - also in terms of who, what, when, where, why, and how - thus providing more usable information for users.

CEREMONY EARTH

Having explored the potential of geobrowsers and the basics of KML, we now turn to a brief overview of Ceremony Earth, which is written in KML and includes embedded videos, photographs, maps, graphics, and text. Once users open the Ceremony Earth KML file in Google Earth, they generally have three choices.6 To begin to explore the embedded materials, users can (i) click on any of the choices in the Places window, (2) open up a tour (which I describe below), or (3) zoom in to the west-central part of New Mexico and click on an embedded icon (see fig. 2).

As users fly in from space and zoom closer to ground level, additional Ceremony Earth icons continue to become visible. From an altitude of forty-six miles, users can discern groupings of embedded icons around the Laguna Pueblo (see the bottom middle of fig. 3), the towns of Cubero and Budville, and Tse'pina. As users continue to zoom into the area around Budville and Cubero, New Mexico, they discover a series of embedded photographs and maps all relating in some way to that particular area (see fig. 4). From Tayo's drinking escapades to his encounters with Night Swan, from his talks with Josiah to his memories of the distant but oncoming thunder, Cubero holds an important place for Tayo in the spiderweb of the novel, and some of those associations are manifested in the digital materials available on Ceremony Earth.

Figure 4 also provides a convenient opportunity to point out the power of prerecorded tours in Ceremony Earth. The Budville/ Cubero tour could begin with a visit to high-resolution photographs of the Budville Trading Company on Route 66 and the Dixie Tavern next door (see fig. 5) with a discussion of Tayo's drinking escapades while going "up the line" to visit the bars along old Route 66. The next stop on the tour could be photographs depicting some of the street and house scenes in Cubero, which is just a mile or so up the road from Budville, to discuss the importance of Night Swan, the presence of Lalo's Bar, and the progression of Tayo's healing ceremony in the narrative.

In his mythical quest, Tayo not only associates the spotted cattle with Cubero but returns yet again to Cubero after one of his drinking sprees with Harley. Although he had been making his way to Lalo's, he finds the bar closed and sits and leans against the wall instead. Staring at the building where Night Swan used to live, Tayo notices how the building and the landscape are merging together to become one and the same, with the adobe bricks "beginning to lose their square shape, taking on the softer contours of the mesas and hills" (108). Tayo begins to feel more comfortable and calm as he feels himself and Cubero begin to merge with the land (Nelson 292).

From the street scenes in Cubero, our tour could take us to look at the scanned images of an old Spanish map of the area (see fig. 9) while the narrator talks about Night Swan's and Cubero's important connections to Mexico and Old Spain, and the affirming hybridity of Tayo's spotted cattle and their association with the direction south. Finally, the tour could take us to the photos of the extinct volcanic cone on the edge of town - while the narrative refers to Tse'pina's active volcanic history and her sacred associations for at least four Indigenous tribes - Laguna, Acoma, Zuni, and Navajo - and we could finish the tour by viewing the photograph of a bluetinted Tse'pina as taken from Cubero, just as Tayo would have seen her in the novel as he listens to the fertile thunder rumbling in the distance, signaling the end of the spiritually destructive drought.

In the photograph of the Dixie Tavern (see fig. 5) you can see Tse'pina in the background, neatly lining up with the actual silhouette of the mountain on the horizon of the satellite imagery. Google Earth allows users to "fly into" these 3D, high-resolution photographs and explore the landscape in far more detail.

Figure 6 offers users an idea of what Tse'pina looked like to Tayo when he gazed at the mountain from Cubero. While the blue tint associated with Tse'pina may be difficult to detect in this photograph, users can see how well the mountain aligns with the underlying satellite imagery, and, more importantly, why the mountain is referred to as "Woman Veiled in Clouds" among the Laguna people.

Figure 7 shows an embedded video clip available in Ceremony Earth. The video was recorded in the area around Tse'pina, and the accompanying audio track is Leslie Silko recorded at the University of New Mexico bookstore in May 2000, explaining the role of landscape in Ceremony and in Laguna culture. Figure 8 demonstrates Ceremony Earth's ability to represent traditional text. While the description box in this Screenshot does not include any images, KML and Google Earth can interpret valid HTML, so designers can include not only graphics but also links, tables, and creative formatting styles as part of their textual descriptions. Figure 9 offers yet another embedded graphic, but this time it's an old Spanish map, retrieved and scanned from the archives of the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico. As I explain above, Cubero's and Laguna's connections to traditional Hispanic culture are replete within the novel.

Rather than sharing photographs, video, or audio I recorded or sharing images I have scanned from public archives, Figure 10 provides an example of material in the public domain that I have gathered and offer for consumption on Ceremony Earth. The particular photograph in Figure 10, titled "The old carreta, Pueblo of Laguna, N.M.," was recorded by William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) in 1890. Housed at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC, the photograph is part of the Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection and can be found online at http://lcweb2.loc.g0v/pp/pphome.html using the keywords "laguna pueblo."

Finally, Figure 11 provides an example of the high-resolution panoramic photographs added to Ceremony Earth. Stitched together from a series of smaller images, these panoramas - many of which present 360-degree views - will offer users a finely detailed exploration of the landscape, once again permitting them to "fly into" the image as they search for meaning and understanding.

Beyond the specific materials I outline above, to tins point I have successfully recorded, organized, and begun identifying more than a thousand digital photographs of Tse'pina and the areas around (but not on) the Laguna Pueblo; created more than thirty-five highresolution panorama photographs from those files; constructed more than ten Flash slideshows; edited three digital videos of that same area; embedded video in Ceremony Earth; embedded numerous photo overlays in Ceremony Earth; and recorded several tours in Ceremony Earth.

CONCLUSION

Ceremony Earth resides in the digitally contemporary realm of the Internet; it provides users with critical, contextual material on a timely basis in an environment in which they feel comfortable, and it provides this information in a wide variety of media formats that permit sophisticated critical analyses.

The nonlinear timeline integral to Silko's narrative requires students to have access to teaching tools that offer help beyond the conventional orientation of traditional textual materials. Convenientiy, then, as users fly through die landscape of Tse'pina in west-central New Mexico and interact with the digital contextual materials of Ceremony Earth, they will learn more about Tayo's story as organized through the spatial perspective of geography than they would if they had engaged with the materials simply via the temporally linear perspective of text.

Moreover, because digital literary tools help users uncover larger patterns of symbols, sounds, text, interpretation, and theory, students and scholars can construct more sophisticated metadiscourses of creative works. If literature scholars want a better perspective on the text they are investigating, they must be able to approach that material from within and without the medium of the text, thereby permitting some objective distance as well as the conceptual abstraction necessary for such work. Digital tools permit users to approach the work from a variety of perspectives and formats unavailable to scholars prior to the 1990s.

Because geobrowsers offer conceptual abstraction concurrently with practical data, they have helped shape, and in turn have been shaped by, contemporary students who grew up with personal computers in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s, and the locationbased technologies in the 2000s. Successful students, those who have learned how to become "capably self-reliant, fiercely independent, curious, interactive, and 'multi-tasking'" (Dresang and McClelland 162), can exploit these digital tools to explore the foundational information necessary to understand new areas of investigation. These students do not want teachers to fill them with seemingly meaningless information; they want instead to discover for themselves the questions, the answers, and the parameters of the investigation. While working in the dialectical atmosphere of a geobrowser, students learn how to make important contextual decisions, how to grapple with abstract concepts, and how to conduct more sophisticated analyses of the materials.

NOTES

1. Google Earth, which can be downloaded for free at earth.google.com, is currendy the best-known and most widely available geobrowser, but Ceremony Earth will work in any Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards-compliant, location-based, 2D or 3D browser.

2. Users can choose to make fewer navigational choices by following a predefined tour.

3. To georeference is to connect data to a specific geographic location (Hill 2006).

4. Keyhole, Inc. was purchased by Google in 2004 ("Marble")

5. Although teaching KML is beyond the scope of this paper, you can visit http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/ to begin learning KML.

6. Although Ceremony Earth is currently available only to students in my classes at Eastern Kentucky University, I hope to make it publicly available when I locate adequate server space and finalize copyright issues.

[Reference]

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[Author Affiliation]

RICK MOTT is an associate professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches Native American literature, visual rhetoric, and critical theory. His research interests include emerging networks of information, the expanding capabilities of producing and consuming digital media, and the fundamental changes taking place in computer-human interfaces.