This QGIS map charts character movements in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. This image represents the end of the novel, in which protagonist Newland Archer visits Paris with the hope of seeing Ellen Olenska, the woman he fell in love with over 20 years before. The 1900 Paris map below is overlaid on a Stamen Toner Map. On the interactive map, type in a location on the search bar on your left to see where the action of the novel takes place. Recommendations: make your first stop New York; then Newport, Rhode Island; then Boston.

For comparison, check out this CartoDB map of the same novel. CartoDB makes it easy to sort for characters and other variables in your data; it will allow students to make quick and attractive visualizations. CartoDB is less friendly to historic maps than QGIS, though, which causes the user to lose an element of historical context.