The KwaZulu-Natal Literary Map on the Web - Reconciling Literary Tourism and Preservation

摘要

This paper is a case study describing the first stage in the development of a web-based literary map. The project aimed to investigate ways of preserving the literature of the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province of South Africa while boosting interest in literary tourism.Hence the KZN Literary Map is meant to function as a literary tourist guide while simultaneously providing an authoritative and evolving research archive of KZN writers and their works. In many instances the writers have been long neglected or suppressed, so their re-publication on the website invites fresh evaluations of the literature.Building the KZN Literary Map required a developmental methodology involving the creation of a series of prototypes, each of which was subjected to a critique by an evaluation panel to improve and refine the design. An account of the process and a consideration of which authors could be claimed as "authentically KZN" are presented in this paper. Each author page includes a short biography, an extract from the writer's work and a bibliography. A clickable map leads the user to the town or region associated with the author.Future research will explore ways of integrating the map with the province's major heritage tourism Internet portal.