About This Work

This map was created by Dr Emily Fitzgerald and Dr Daniel Russo-Batterham of the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (MDAP), University of Melbourne, and myself. It visualizes the research I conducted for my PhD, a transnational oral history with Australian and American Vietnam veterans who returned to Viêt Nam after the War. The map shows the movements of the veterans interviewed during and after the War.

Return to Vietnam: Mapping American And Australian Veterans’ Journeys

Throughout my PhD, I had an idea in my head of a digital world map, showing veterans’ travels back and forth from Vietnam, first during the war and then afterwards. I wanted the map to be interactive, with embedded audio-clips of veterans describing significant points in their journeys, and to be able to follow individual journeys one-by-one or to watch the collective pathways of veterans over time.

Talking to other oral historians, it became clear that digital maps were a common idea for visualising the trajectory of our interviewees’ lives – we just hadn’t figured out how to create them. But, late in my candidature, I came across a few different maps, including the Colonial Frontier Massacres Map and those visualised on the Metrocosm site, which indicated that it could be done.

Colonial Frontier Massacres, Australia, 1780 to 1930.
Project led by Professor Lyndall Ryan at the University of Newcastle in consultation with The Wollotuka Institute and AIATSIS

Metrocosm map of global immigration flows from 2010 to 2015

In 2019, I began a residency in the Arts Faculty’s Digital Studio and a collaboration with MDAP, with the idea of bringing my ‘Return to Vietnam’ map to life. I worked with Daniel Russo-Batterham and Emily Fitzgerald at MDAP. Daniel and Emily are the backbone of the project – they showed me how to get my data into shape and developed the code and actual map itself.

The first thing to do was clean my data into something that could be mapped. This was the most time-consuming part of the project at my end. There is, unfortunately, no simple way of taking complex qualitative data and extracting geodata – dates linked to locations. Instead, it’s basically poring over interviews, along with any other relevant material, like articles, blogs, and documentaries, to figure out where and when veterans moved around. I was looking not only for their combat tours and return dates, but where they were stationed on different rotations during the war, whether they moved after the war, what itineraries they followed upon their return.

Using a spreadsheet that I created of cleaned data points, Emily developed a code to geolocate the places I’d identified with coordinates. Emily used a Juypter notebook, Python, and a Python client called GeoPy to do this, as shown on the map below.

A sanity-check of geolocations for Return to Vietnam, coded from the cleaned data, presented in Google Map

Emily and Daniel then started building the map itself, firstly testing it in a Jupyter notebook using Pydeck, a Python wrapper for Deck.gl, itself a framework for visualising data on maps, and a Mapbox base map. They then used the JavaScript based Deck.gl directly, as well as using the web framework Django to create a web app to place it in. A final development was to replicate the map using React and the Next JS framework, to more easily animate and update what was being shown. Meanwhile, I clipped audiofiles from interviews to embed into veterans’ journeys.

The Mapbox base map in development, with all journeys overlapping

The benefits of the mapping project are already clear. The process of extracting geodata from veterans’ interviews, although time-consuming, helped me establish a much deeper knowledge of their journeys. It demonstrated, for instance, the logistical difficulty of travelling around Việt Nam in the early 1990s compared to the mid-2010s. By locating their stories in place and providing geographic context, I also found things in interviews that I hadn’t seen before. It helped me understand why certain veterans attached emotional significance to particular landscapes, such as rivers or mountains.

The map also demonstrated an important pattern I’d identified in my dissertation: American veterans were posted all over southern Vietnamese provinces during the war and, when they went back to Vietnam, they tended to return not only to that province but to other major sites and cities. Australian veterans, on the other hand, were almost all stationed in one province in Vietnam during the war and their returns were concentrated around this province – many never went to Hanoi or Danang, for example. These national differences in the geographies of return highlighted the disjointed nature of the American war experience and the comparatively cohesive nature of the Australian war experience, which helped to explain key differences in how Australian and American veterans’ memories of war and imaginaries of Vietnam.

Finally, digital mapping is a new way of sharing oral history interviews, in a way that is more accessible than books, journals, or archives. Maps like these offer a novel approach to sharing stories about our past.

Scholars interested in collaborating with MDAP to create their own map can contact them for further information.

An earlier version of this “About” post was originally published by SHAPS Forum at the University of Melbourne.

Note - map works best using Chrome.