discussion

Those of you who were interested in the subjective atlas of Palestine lecture or the use of subjective maps I listened to a good radio broadcast that you can hear online. The text below is also taken from the website with a description of what the broadcast is about.

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1211

110: Mapping

Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps
the traditional way—by drawing things we can see. And other stories
about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste.
The world redrawn by the five senses.

Prologue.
Ralph Gentles and five other people spend each summer creating a map
of every crack, every depression, every protrusion, every pothole in
the sidewalks of New York City. We hear why, and we hear all the
things their map does not include. Mapmaking means ignoring everything
in the world but the one thing being mapped, whether it’s cracks in
sidewalks or the homes of Hollywood stars. And, according to
cartographer Denis Wood, we live in the Age of Maps: more than 99.9
percent of all the maps that have ever existed have been made in the
last 100 years. (5 minutes)

Act One. Sight.

Denis Wood talks with host Ira Glass about the maps he’s made of his
own neighborhood, Boylan Heights in Raleigh, North Carolina. They
include a traditional street locator map; a map of all the sewer and
power lines under the earth’s surface; a map of how light falls on the
ground through the leaves of trees; a map of where all the Halloween
pumpkins are each year; and a map of all the graffiti in the
neighborhood. In short, he’s creating maps that are more like novels,
trying to describe everyday life. See some of Denis’s maps.

Denis Wood is author of The Power of Maps. (8 minutes)

Act Two. Hearing.

TAL contributor Jack Hitt visits Toby Lester, who has mapped all the
ambient sounds in his world: the hum of the heater, the fan on the
computer. (11 minutes)

Song: “Way over Yonder in the Minor Key,” Billy Bragg and Wilco

Act Three. Smell.

A story about a device that charts the world through smell—and only
smell. TAL producer Nancy Updike visits Cyrano Sciences in Pasadena,
California, where researchers are creating an electronic nose. (9
minutes)

Act Four. Touch.

Deb Monroe reports on how she has been mapping her own body through
her sense of touch. (9 minutes)

Act Five. Taste.

Jonathan Gold goes to the places on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles that
he visited back in the early 1980s. He tells the story of how he
decided to map an entire street using his sense of taste, and how
doing this changed his life.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 8:39 pm by catherine_doyle and is filed under Subjective Atlas, mapping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.