How to Use This Map

This map visualizes the research conducted by Mia Martin Hobbs for her 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, and includes snippets from interviews with some of these veterans.

This page will provide some guidence to use the map and all of it's features. It will cover:

• Selecting the Veterans
• Layer Options
• Moving Around the Map
• Moving through Time
• Playing Audio

The map works best using Chrome or Firefox as the browser.

Selecting the Veterans

By default, the map shows the journeys of all 69 veterans included in the project. If you would like to change this, to look at one person in particular, or a smaller group of veterans, scroll down to the table underneath the map. There you can select or deselect who is included. The checkbox in the header row allows you to select or deselect all at once.

The table starts with all rows showing, but can be changed by selecting the rows per page at the bottom of the table.

Layer Options

There are four different layer options - that is, what you would like shown on the map. You can choose to have as many selected at the same time as you would like. The options are:

• Show cities: Uses dots to mark each city the veterans travelled to. Dots are colour-coded based on the country of the city.

• Show lines: Traces the movement of each veteran by connecting each place they travelled to with a straight line. lines are colour coded based on the veteran.

• Show arcs: Traces the movement of each veteran by connecting each place they travelled to with an arc. Arcs are colour coded based on the veteran.
  • Note: The arcs are viewed more clearly if you change the pitch of the map, so that you aren't looking straight down at it.
    To change the pitch, hold down the 'option' key (if you are using a mac) or the 'ALT' key (if you are using a PC), then click and drag your mouse up. This should move the map so that it is now appearing to be lying flat.
    
• Show movement: An animated layer, that shows the movements of the veterans over time with a comet style line that fades away at the tail. The animation moves on a year by year interval, so if a veteran travelled multiple times in a year, all those movements will be shown at once. Movements are colour coded based on the veteran.

When you open the map, the default layers are Show Cities and Show Movement.

Moving Around the Map

You can use your mouse to move around the map on the screen:

• Click and dragging the mouse will move the you to a different section of the map;
• Holding down the option (mac) or ALT (PC) key while clicking and draging will change the angle that you are looking at the map. Move the mouse up or down to change the pitch, or to the side to change the bearing. This is particularly useful with the Show arc layer;
• Holding down the option (mac) or ALT (PC) key while clicking and draging will change the angle that you are looking at the map. Move the mouse up or down to change the pitch, or to the side to change the bearing. This is particularly useful with the Show arc layer;
• Zoom in and out using your mouse wheel or pinching on a touchpad.
  Important note: currently it is not possible to zoom in on areas of the map on the eastern half of the Pacific (e.g. the Americas) do to an issue with the underlying system that we are trying to resolve.

If you click on a line, arc, or movement, a new section appears between the range slider and the map. This includes the veteran's name, the year, where they are travelling to and from, and, if there is audio, an audio player widget.

(see Playing Audio for more information).

Moving Through Time

To move the map through time, use the range slider at the top of the page.

You can move this manually, but clicking and dragging on the handle of the range slider, moving it forward or backward. If you have the Show movements layer selected, this will move the lines on the map to show the journeys in each year.

The map also includes three buttons to automatically move the slider for you:

reset: Moves the slider back to the beginning, the speed back to very slow, and starts the slider auto playing.

play/pause: Button alternates between play and pause, to start the animation or pause the animation if it is running.

fast forward: Changes the speed that the slider moves. Each time you click the button, it will cycle through to the next option (very slow > slow > fast > very fast > very slow).

Playing Audio

Many of the journeys on the map include a snippet of audio from the interviews conducted that relate to journey (or the year it was conducted in). You can listen to this audio by clicking on the relevant movement, line, or arc (depending on which layer you have selected).

When a journey is selected (either manually or through autoplay), a new section appears between the range slider and the map which includes an audio player widget. In the widget there is a play and pause button, volume control, and, if you click on the three dots, the ability to control the speed of the audio.

The map will only play audio from one veteran per year, even if there are multiple options available for a year.

There is also an option to turn on or off autoplay when using the range slider (the default is for it to be on).

When autoplay is turned on, as the slider moves through the years, if there is a journey with audio attached in that year, it will pause the slider and play the audio. Pressing pause on the audio will cause the slider to resume its movement.

Note: If you want to stop both the time slider and the audio playing, first pause the slider, then the audio.

We recommend having the range slider paused when you turn the autoplay on or off. It will still work, but you may then need to press the play/pause button twice to get it to correctly work again.