For someone who has never paid much attention to maps, getting to look at a variety of city maps in class was definitely an eye opening experience. When I first engaged with the maps (specifically the Edmonton crime map) I imagine my way of going about it was much like other peoples’: check out my neighborhood and then compare. I would click around and move on. However when we took the time to analyze them in class I was forced to ask myself questions that had eluded me at first: what was being left out? What was being highlighted, and why did the cartographer choose to do so? I found that when I stopped to ask myself these questions they became much more interesting.
To no surprise I found the creative cartography projects to be much more enticing. Instead of straightforward statistics these maps seek to draw connections between the places and the people that interact with them. My favorites were Hitotoki classic maps, the Stockport Emotion map and the New York sound map (I now have the most overwhelming urge to go back to New York). In Lucy Lippard’s work she posits that places shape us, and likewise we inform the places around us. For myself, attaching memories and personal anecdotes to a place bring it life and give someone a “real” feel for the space. I’m left wondering what it would look like if traditional statistical maps of Edmonton were combined with an emotion map. Would peoples’ reactions to stimuli correspond to the preconceived assumptions about the different areas of the city?
