About the Contributors...

This Google Lit Trip was developed jointly by the students of "GE 13186 - Fictions of the Known World" at the University of Notre Dame under the supervision of Professor Tobias Boes (tboes at nd dot edu) during the fall semester of 2008.

Students were divided into four groups of various sizes, and assigned the task of either creating KML markups for specific locations mentioned in the novel (Lübeck, Travemünde and Beyond), or of presenting pertinent background information in geospatial format (The Hanseatic League, The 1848 Revolution).  The goal of this exercise, and of the class as a whole, was to show that literature can act as a kind of map and has a profound effect on the ways in which a culture imagines its place in the known world.  A secondary goal of the Lit Trip assignment was to raise student awareness of intellectual copyright issues; all quotations required proper citation and all images had to be either in the public domain or had to undergo prior copyright clearance.

Tobias Boes (tboes at nd dot edu) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame, where he specializes in German culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in the history of the novel.  The names of all the students who were involved with this project can be found within the Lit Trip itself.  For more information about German Studies at the University of Notre Dame, please visit: http://www.nd.edu/~grl/german/index.html.