I’ve just been reading Katherine Harmon’s new book called You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. She compiled a set of maps which you’ll just have to see for yourself, such as:
- Boylan Heights pumpkin map (outlines of pumpkin designs in the neighborhood on Halloween)
- Main Route of Expedition through the Alimentary Canal, the human body as a geographical map (“Hartsdale”, “Clavicle Ridge”, “West Kidney”)
- What’s up? South!, a standard geopolitical map of the world—except for one thing.
- A New Yorker’s Idea of the United States of America, stretching East and West, compressing the middle. Reminds me of Saul Steinburg’s world maps that were used as New Yorker covers.
- World of Experience, a design-your-own “experience map.” Sounds like something my mom would do.
At least check it out in the bookstore/library. What I like is that there is emotion and function in these maps, to varying degrees, and there’s not always a trade-off between the two.
Thinking about maps and web sites and photography… I was remembering an old idea of a global photographic library that uses geography as the main axis of organization. Photo.net has their library, but the focus is on the metadata: critiquing technical aspects of the photos, or musing, “Hey, do you think this is good art?”
The site I’m thinking of really depends on the audience. Either it’s a multimedia blog/art project (an extension of LiveJournal?), or it’s a “you are a reporter” kind of site (the ultimate way to get beyond “media bias”?), an underground media outlet—a look at what’s going on under the surface in this world.
But the point is that it’s centered on places and people and their stories—their photography is simply one way of telling a story. It’s more spontaneous, but anyone can be involved. I hate to equate it to the Lomo brand, but that may be a close relative. Digital cameras can be a lot of fun—and now that everyone has a camera (phone) in their pocket all the time, with the means to send images, I think a geographical representation would make things very interesting.
The stories told by these cameras don’t have to be newspaper articles on politics, or This American Life-style feel-good pieces, or local news shock-value stories. They can be all of these, or none. Someone takes photographs of what they think is important. Who am I to interfere?
As a visitor, I can click on my area and see what my neighbors are doing. It’s got this sick vouyeristic thing to it that I love. Or I can bring up London W10 and see what’s going on there. How exciting to browse by geography, then look at photographs over time.
The trick, of course, is filtering. Isn’t that always the trick? Do you use a set of editors to filter what’s coming in manually? Do you let it be a free for all? How about Slashdot-style voting; do you let people vote on which photos/notes/sounds are most interesting?
Are there other ways you’d want to organize the information?