Mapping Life
2.13.2011
Perhaps as a result of my years as a Boy Scout (they can't take that Eagle Scout away from me!) or long summer car trips up and down I-95 with triptych maps from AAA, I have a deep-seated love of maps. As an adolescent, in place of posters of sports heroes and rock gods, my walls were filled with topo maps tracing backpacking treks through the Philmont ranch and New Hampshire's Presidential Range. Still tucked away in a closet in my parents' house is a shoebox filled with the complete set of USGS Quadrangle maps for Yosemite National Park, covered with ballpoint lines scribbled notes, and the grimy fingerprints of unwashed hikers.
My bedroom has long since been converted to a guest room themed after my mother's south Florida childhood, but my newer home retains traces of my connections to geography in a letterpress map of Brooklyn and a chart of European language families. Beyond the visual, Lauren and I have a travel journal of our 2005 roadtrip complete with daily play lists and menus (mmmm...canned chili...). In 2004, I printed an accordion book of my trip to France using maps and transfer images.
All this is to say that I understand how a sense of place in both geography and time can be closely intertwined with one's sense of self. You know who you are by where you've been. When I talk about the peaks outside of Taos, I am also talking about a very different me than when I discuss the dining options of South Brooklyn. But also the same me.
Mytravelmaps hack on designswarm connected with my need to map and be mapped. Google maps provides us with the tools to map our experiences and create physical artifacts that give a sense of permanence to our fleeting and faulty memories. What's a better place to store our past, the cloud or the bookshelf?
It's a trick question: the cloud isn't a place.
But the cloud does give us the power easily organize and track our journeys. Foursquare works as a fun "game" using the power of GPS in my everyday life, but think of how much easier it would be to use a Foursquare-esque program to track your journeys: instant map placement, restaurant names and info, photo uploads, and atext box for journal entries all in one convenient app on our smartphone. Available worldwide 24 hours a day, no more digging out your journal from the bottom of a rucksack or writing with a flashlight in your mouth as 10 other hostelers toss and turn on bunk beds around you. Of course, the ease of sharing bar suggestions with friends might ruin the serendipity of mis-remembering restaurant names ("Did I really eat at the golden carbuncle?") or locations ("Its the third left off of the circle and then stop when you see the shoe-shine boys. I swear that its the greatest lengua in all of Bolivia."), but network difficulties will be certain to add a sense of adventure. And you really want to be sure to avoid "the bedbug hotel" even if it means fewer stories for the grand-children. Good-bye Lonely Planet, and hello Jake and John Barcelona 2009, with added notes from Tim ca. 2004.
Of course, to make this Web 2.0 venture profitable, we'd have to add on a production staff to layout and sell the hard-copies, but with the Kindle and what not there have got to be tons of out of work publishers, right?
