March 9, 2016 • 20 mins
Finding our way in the world is one of the most fundamental things we humans do, and maps map it possible. But on some level, these maps are a thing of fiction.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From how stuff works dot com. This is the stuff
of life. Welcome to the Stuff of Life. I'm your host,
Julie Douglas. Here be dragons. We've mapped the mountains of
the Moon, the lava fields of Mars. We map the
(00:22):
trails of migrant whales. We map the farthest stars. We
map the oceans shifting shore. We've mapped the open sky,
the treasure rooms of incatoons, and where the lay lions lie. Ye.
(00:46):
Finding our way in the world is one of the
most fundamental things we humans do. It's survival one oh one.
Using site to guide us. Think of the strong verticals
and trees, and the horizon line moving our eyes up
cross it to create the most rudimentary of maps. Perhaps
that's why there are so many visual nerve cells dedicated
(01:07):
to the detection of horizontal and vertical planes rather than
diagonal ones. After all, our environment is based on this
x y axis. Human beings are all of us are
trapped in a spatial box. I mean, everything we do
takes place in a space, and wayfinding isn't just about
(01:27):
physical space around us, that the internal space as well,
Like the path that neurons take transmitting information to make
memories and serve up thoughts. It's also in our body's
ability to perceive itself to test our bodies mapping abilities.
Fellow podcaster Holly Fry and I stumbled through a few
vortex tunnels illusions at the Haunted attraction nether World. Here,
(01:53):
darkened hallways have no x Y coordinates to fix your
gaze on, and the halls reverberate in the swirl of booming,
buzzing confusion. Oh my god, swirling stars around me. It's like,
I'm going to see this barrel and oh my god,
how's it going? Holly good? Those twisty rooms and the
(02:15):
vortex room, they genuinely jack with your equilibrium. Losing the
ability to pin yourself down in space and time can
be terrifying, and perhaps this is why we can't stand
to get lost, even for the briefest of moments. An idea.
I took to my house to works coworkers podcaster Jonathan
Strickland and senior editor Alison louder Milk. It's time for
(02:38):
me to leave. It's time for me to go back
to my hotel, grab my stuff and then go to
the airport. Couldn't I get a cab to take me
over to Queen's. So I was thinking, well, I've I've
budgeted enough time, I will take the subway. The level
of panic I experienced when I realized maps were no
good to me here. It didn't give me enough information, right,
(03:01):
I couldn't I couldn't offload that to technology. I was
now dependent upon my own ability, which I had very
little confidence in. Jonathan is very seldom without global satellite capabilities,
but that day his way finding mission from Manhattan to
Queens wouldn't have benefited from it. Anyhow. For Allison, the
(03:26):
wilds of New York were tamed with recognizable landmarks. So
I'm glad you brought up New York City. I lived
there for my undergrad college experience and then um for
a while after, and I noticed that the easiest way
for me to get around the subway system was by landmarks.
So say I'm getting out at Columbus Circle. I knew
(03:48):
where the fountain was in the in the circle, and
so I would orient myself towards that, Like, Okay, if
I'm facing the circle, and that means I'm facing north,
and I've come out at this entrance, and the McDonald's
is on the west corner, and if I'm want to
go um cross town, I need to head toward the McDonald's.
And so I had completely populated my landscape of New
York City with all these arbitrary little landmarks to help
(04:11):
me navigate, you know, my life. Then these sorts of
non GPS moments are far and few between these days.
In fact, thanks to geographic information systems, we can overlay
maps with just about anything, even Happiness doctors Peter Sheridan
(04:32):
Dodds and Chris stan Forth use big data to make
the case that across ten languages they surveyed, people use
more positive words than negative ones. They use twenty four
sources like websites, music, lyrics, fiction, and social media to
build up a database of words, billions and billions of
words from Twitter alone, they collected roughly one hundred billion
(04:54):
of them. And then, in a kind of part B
to this study, Dods and dan Forth created a head
DNA meter happiness meter, that traces the signals of emotions
in Twitter communications, and they found out all sorts of
details about when and where we're happiest. So I thought,
the most interesting thing about this steady, and it's one
that I hadn't really thought about before, is that they
(05:16):
found that the further people were from home, the happier
they were. What do you guys think about that. It
may not be so much that you're not as happy
at home as you are just familiar with everything. Like
if I travel to Japan, I'm sure I would be
expressing wonder and awe as I traveled the country, walking
(05:40):
around my yard. I'm not likely to do that unless
something truly extraordinary has happened. Allison brings up a good
point about the source of this study, social media, and
whether it's a reliable barometer. I do wonder, though, in
that aggregate, how much they are taking into account the
fact that we try to present like our best selves
(06:02):
book or our worst selves as the case maybe um,
depending upon what you're feeling. So I wonder if the
studies take that into account. Well. Also, there's this kind
of echo chamber of what you're saying spiraled out among
your social groups, So is that really an accurate sense
of what that social group feels. Are they just reacting
(06:23):
as we have this discussion right now, my social media
feeds are absolutely consumed with the political process of the
United States, and I see exactly what you're saying, Julie,
I see this kind of echo chamber resonance chamber thing
going on to a point where my perception of what
(06:43):
is going to happen is largely skewed by that, so
that when reality sets in a day later after, say,
the primaries have you know, super Tuesday has passed, are
very different from what I would have expected based upon
my experience, simply because that echo chamber has has reinforced
(07:03):
this idea, and I've created my own kind of, if
you will, map of where things are going that's not
at all based upon any reliable data, but rather on
this this echoing uh sentiment that I'm hearing that has
shaped my perception of what will be. Social media is
(07:24):
a map of storytelling, the details of what we choose
to disclose and how that shapes the overarching narrative of
our autobiography, the story of our lives charted out in
our imaginations. So what would Jonathan and Allison's autobiographical map
look like? It literally would look like England. I'm probably
(07:46):
a romanticized, perhaps even fantastical version of England. Price of
Middle Earth worked into their I do have a Lord
of the Rings tattoo on one arm, So I mean,
I can't get that far away from it. But that
to me, like when I think about my past, there's
certain very important events happened to me while I was
in England. I've only been in England a few times,
but all the times I've been have been pivotal moments.
(08:09):
My honeymoon was in England, for example. I spent a
week with very close friends in England where we all
learned interesting things about one another and got hopelessly lost.
All of these moments just kind of pulled back. And
even though I've spent more, way more time out of
England than in it, I feel like I could cram
(08:30):
pretty much everywhere else I've been into this fictional map.
I think that mine would like a little bit like Phillery.
And I don't know if you guys have read the
Musician's trilogy, which is wonderful. Just finished up the last
one and I'm sad love grossmend right more. Please. My
map is hand painted, and it's hand lettered, and it's
(08:52):
probably a little bit off scale. And the house where
I grew up in is kind of Castle Lake, and
they're various figures who are important in my life back
then and still are today, and they're kind of gathered
around the castle, and then we go out into the wilds.
You know, here's New York City, a tiny dot that
was pretty pivotal in my growing up years, my twenties. Uh,
(09:15):
and here's Atlanta. I mean, actually, I think it would
be a map of the east, the East coast, but
it would be lovely. It would be a lovely map
of the East Coast of the United States, and one
that really has no relevance for anyone else. I think
Alison's map features Philary and this place is similar to
mine in that Narnia is a fictional place and it
(09:36):
figures as a backdrop in my life. Map The Lion,
the Which and the Wardrobe was one of the first
places my mind could reliably retreat to a fantasy land
that explored what it was like to be a child
shaped by the forces around her. And in that respect,
each of us has a bit of the fictional world
woven into our autobiography. Yeah. Well, if I had to
(10:02):
make an autobiographical map of my life, in terms of
what it would look like, I would think back to
earlier medieval maps, where fast expanses of the known world
hadn't been explored or discovered yet, so you'd have these
old maps with vast expanses of empty land and empty
(10:24):
ocean where it was blank, nothing was really there um
And usually those parts of the maps are where you
would find all of these monsters. Um. They kind of
represented the unknown, so they were placed in the unknown
portions of maps. That's Toronto based artists Bailey Henderson. She
brings mythological secreatures from medieval and Renaissance maps to life
(10:48):
in her ongoing sculpture series Monstrom Marines. In her research,
Bailey was struck by one particular map, the Carter Marina,
drawn by Alls Magnus. In it features a bestiary of
marine animals, the kinds that sailors would trade stories about,
beasts said to tear a ship asunder and plunge it
(11:08):
into the briny depths. One such beast is Zivious. This
bronze sculpture depicts a bird faced worka with a dorsal
thing that can slice boats in half. And it turns
out that this kind of land and sea animal mashup
(11:29):
is common and the Renaissance it was a common belief
that all of the animals presented on land had their
counterpart in the sea. So on a lot of early
maps and text you would see creatures like a sea pig,
or a sea dog, sea lion, a seahorse. They are
just completely ridiculous creatures that obviously didn't ever exist. But
(11:53):
it's quite an amazing, uh, the imagination that early artists
ad when they were depicting these creatures. Here with these
maps we see Bailey's imagination working spatially, willing these two
D beasts into a three D sculptural existence, which is
in stark opposition of what we do in real life.
(12:16):
In real life, we survey our three D surroundings an
attempt to freeze them into a tableau, compressing the details
to what we wanted to look like. And in this
way there's an interplay between one is real and what
is fiction. To me, all maps are fictional. It's important
to when you look at a map to kind of
(12:37):
ask yourself the question, what has he or she decided
to leave out? What rhetorical messages being given, even the
ones that people think are you know, this is the
most scientifically accurate piece of cartography. I'm John Hessler. I'm
a specialist in modern cartography and geographic information sciences Here
(12:59):
at the Library of Congress, Geographic Information System g i
S is changing the way we take in details from
the world. It's like mapping on steroids, allowing us to question, analyze,
and interpret data to understand all sorts of relationships, patterns,
and even trends. So g i S and and modern
(13:20):
mapping are really an attempt to kind of abstract from
this huge, complex, multidimensional um mess that is the world
um and to visualize what's actually happening. An example here
is crisis mapping in after a devastating earthquake hit Nepal,
it took only forty eight hours for volunteers to map
(13:41):
incredibly useful data, like areas that had passable roads to
get supplies to and from, and areas that had given
way to landslides. This is a kind of humanitarian ground
swell of technology. My interest in cartography has always been,
at least in modern cartography, is how do we use
this data to help people. My involvement with crisis mappers
(14:04):
UM and and and the humanitarian mapping world is all
about that, to kind of plan for things that are unexpected,
things that are happening and changing rapidly. Almost everything that
we humans do is never an equilibrium. It's always changing.
A city is a thing that used to be thought
of this kind of the stable UM place, but it's not.
(14:26):
It's the transportation is moving, there's energy going in and out,
there's all kinds of things happening. UM. How do we
plan that to make people's lives better. That's not to
say this kind of technology is perfect. While on the
one hand, there's this this really beautiful side of you know,
what can we do to UM use this technology in
(14:48):
order to improve people's lives, to plan better, to figure
out how to deliver fresh water to people better, to
um plan all of those kind of resources and agricultural
land use and all of that stuff. There's also that
that negative side that the more of this data that
gets out there, of course, the more information that that
other people have about us UM government agencies and and
(15:10):
that kind of thing marketers UM. So there's the there's
the double edged sword there in this sense. G I
S mapping is Pandora's box. Will never be able to
stuff it back in and close the latch, and we
probably wouldn't want to do that even if we could.
After all, it's changed the way that we move through
the world. People use it to pick hotel rooms. They
(15:32):
go and they look at what the orientation of the
hotel is, and they, you know, decide what room in
a hotel they might want to stay in based on
the view that they can see on Google Earth. UM.
And so I think it's taken the difficulty of wayfinding
out um. In other words, the space of wayfinding, the
anxiety of finding your way has has kind of disappeared.
(15:53):
Where we're all on our phones, um, looking for the
Starbucks that's a block away with our little GPS and
our smartphone owns or or anything like that. We we
no longer have to wander about looking for anything. And
the spatial aspect of mapping has exploded, spiraling out and
influencing every sector of technology, even game design. Take Minecraft,
(16:17):
for example, a game that looks deceptively simple with its
basic survival premise and block architecture to build shelters with.
But it turns out that Minecraft is really sophisticated and
it requires a lot of spatial and problem solving skills.
It's taking advantage of a certain cognitive way we perceive spaces. Um.
One thing, when you build a Minecraft space you're kind
(16:38):
of moving through it. And I think that's an interesting,
uh cognitive way to look at at at mapping. Mapping
usually is a space that someone is moving through, that
people are moving through, but in Minecraft, um it's especially
important that that people can move through the space that
you're building. Disability to throw off the shackles of space
(17:00):
may help to explain the fanaticism of Minecraft players. And
I think it really does compartmentalize a certain um, a
certain fantasy we have about breaking out of what is
our normal spatial box. Um. Humans have always wanted to
kind of like throw off space, throw off this this
(17:21):
this geometric thing that kind of keeps us down and
keeps us in place. That one thing that humans can't
do is flyes. And I think these things kind of
play on that. John's life is in maps, and this
has changed the way that he sees the world. Now
we can do real time mapping, Now we can do
stuff that's updating itself, you know immediately, and and and
(17:45):
looking at that, and the way that changed my worldview
is is that I now look at the world as
never in equilibrium, that there's never anything that's not changing.
Everything is in motion, everything is happening um. Everything is interactive,
everything is connected. Maps are contours of the human experience,
(18:10):
laid out on an emotional grid, And in those contours
we consider location, distance, history, people, and whether we want
to go there or have been there, whether we once
stood on a mountaintop picking out the Big Dipper from
a wreath of brilliant stars hanging overhead, or whether we
dreamed it or flew over it on Google Earth, moving
(18:30):
through space and time in our minds. Think of all
the ephemeral maps you leave behind each day, the physical
and digital footprints marking your paths, and the stories these
routes tell about where you are in your life and
who you are in your life, the outward evidence of
your inner wayfinding. We've mapped the bloody universe and pinned
(18:55):
it in a net, but as for dots of humans,
we've made no progress. Yes, The Stuff of Life is
(19:24):
written and co produced by me Julie Douglas. Original music
and sound design is by co producer Noel Brown. This
episode also featured tracks from the album Mechanical Advantage by
The Cubists. Editorial oversight is provided by Head of production
Jerry Rowland. Excerpts of hireby Dragons is by Felix Dennis.
We'd like to thank John Hessler for revealing the illuminating
(19:47):
ways in which we map the world. You can find
out more about John's work at Warping History dot blogspot
dot com. Thank you to Bailey Henderson for discussing your
research into medieval and Renaissance maps. Check at her sculpture
series Monstro Marines at Bailey Henderson dot com. And thank
you to Alison Ladermilk and Jonathan Strickland for sharing your travels,
(20:09):
real and imagined. If you like what we do here
at the Stuff of Life, visit us on Facebook and Twitter.
In the meantime, email us a drawing or a description
of your autobiographical map at the Stuff of Life at
Housta works dot com.
From how stuff works dot com. This is the stuff
of life. Welcome to the Stuff of Life. I'm your host,
Julie Douglas. Here be dragons. We've mapped the mountains of
the Moon, the lava fields of Mars. We map the
(00:22):
trails of migrant whales. We map the farthest stars. We
map the oceans shifting shore. We've mapped the open sky,
the treasure rooms of incatoons, and where the lay lions lie. Ye.
(00:46):
Finding our way in the world is one of the
most fundamental things we humans do. It's survival one oh one.
Using site to guide us. Think of the strong verticals
and trees, and the horizon line moving our eyes up
cross it to create the most rudimentary of maps. Perhaps
that's why there are so many visual nerve cells dedicated
(01:07):
to the detection of horizontal and vertical planes rather than
diagonal ones. After all, our environment is based on this
x y axis. Human beings are all of us are
trapped in a spatial box. I mean, everything we do
takes place in a space, and wayfinding isn't just about
(01:27):
physical space around us, that the internal space as well,
Like the path that neurons take transmitting information to make
memories and serve up thoughts. It's also in our body's
ability to perceive itself to test our bodies mapping abilities.
Fellow podcaster Holly Fry and I stumbled through a few
vortex tunnels illusions at the Haunted attraction nether World. Here,
(01:53):
darkened hallways have no x Y coordinates to fix your
gaze on, and the halls reverberate in the swirl of booming,
buzzing confusion. Oh my god, swirling stars around me. It's like,
I'm going to see this barrel and oh my god,
how's it going? Holly good? Those twisty rooms and the
(02:15):
vortex room, they genuinely jack with your equilibrium. Losing the
ability to pin yourself down in space and time can
be terrifying, and perhaps this is why we can't stand
to get lost, even for the briefest of moments. An idea.
I took to my house to works coworkers podcaster Jonathan
Strickland and senior editor Alison louder Milk. It's time for
(02:38):
me to leave. It's time for me to go back
to my hotel, grab my stuff and then go to
the airport. Couldn't I get a cab to take me
over to Queen's. So I was thinking, well, I've I've
budgeted enough time, I will take the subway. The level
of panic I experienced when I realized maps were no
good to me here. It didn't give me enough information, right,
(03:01):
I couldn't I couldn't offload that to technology. I was
now dependent upon my own ability, which I had very
little confidence in. Jonathan is very seldom without global satellite capabilities,
but that day his way finding mission from Manhattan to
Queens wouldn't have benefited from it. Anyhow. For Allison, the
(03:26):
wilds of New York were tamed with recognizable landmarks. So
I'm glad you brought up New York City. I lived
there for my undergrad college experience and then um for
a while after, and I noticed that the easiest way
for me to get around the subway system was by landmarks.
So say I'm getting out at Columbus Circle. I knew
(03:48):
where the fountain was in the in the circle, and
so I would orient myself towards that, Like, Okay, if
I'm facing the circle, and that means I'm facing north,
and I've come out at this entrance, and the McDonald's
is on the west corner, and if I'm want to
go um cross town, I need to head toward the McDonald's.
And so I had completely populated my landscape of New
York City with all these arbitrary little landmarks to help
(04:11):
me navigate, you know, my life. Then these sorts of
non GPS moments are far and few between these days.
In fact, thanks to geographic information systems, we can overlay
maps with just about anything, even Happiness doctors Peter Sheridan
(04:32):
Dodds and Chris stan Forth use big data to make
the case that across ten languages they surveyed, people use
more positive words than negative ones. They use twenty four
sources like websites, music, lyrics, fiction, and social media to
build up a database of words, billions and billions of
words from Twitter alone, they collected roughly one hundred billion
(04:54):
of them. And then, in a kind of part B
to this study, Dods and dan Forth created a head
DNA meter happiness meter, that traces the signals of emotions
in Twitter communications, and they found out all sorts of
details about when and where we're happiest. So I thought,
the most interesting thing about this steady, and it's one
that I hadn't really thought about before, is that they
(05:16):
found that the further people were from home, the happier
they were. What do you guys think about that. It
may not be so much that you're not as happy
at home as you are just familiar with everything. Like
if I travel to Japan, I'm sure I would be
expressing wonder and awe as I traveled the country, walking
(05:40):
around my yard. I'm not likely to do that unless
something truly extraordinary has happened. Allison brings up a good
point about the source of this study, social media, and
whether it's a reliable barometer. I do wonder, though, in
that aggregate, how much they are taking into account the
fact that we try to present like our best selves
(06:02):
book or our worst selves as the case maybe um,
depending upon what you're feeling. So I wonder if the
studies take that into account. Well. Also, there's this kind
of echo chamber of what you're saying spiraled out among
your social groups, So is that really an accurate sense
of what that social group feels. Are they just reacting
(06:23):
as we have this discussion right now, my social media
feeds are absolutely consumed with the political process of the
United States, and I see exactly what you're saying, Julie,
I see this kind of echo chamber resonance chamber thing
going on to a point where my perception of what
(06:43):
is going to happen is largely skewed by that, so
that when reality sets in a day later after, say,
the primaries have you know, super Tuesday has passed, are
very different from what I would have expected based upon
my experience, simply because that echo chamber has has reinforced
(07:03):
this idea, and I've created my own kind of, if
you will, map of where things are going that's not
at all based upon any reliable data, but rather on
this this echoing uh sentiment that I'm hearing that has
shaped my perception of what will be. Social media is
(07:24):
a map of storytelling, the details of what we choose
to disclose and how that shapes the overarching narrative of
our autobiography, the story of our lives charted out in
our imaginations. So what would Jonathan and Allison's autobiographical map
look like? It literally would look like England. I'm probably
(07:46):
a romanticized, perhaps even fantastical version of England. Price of
Middle Earth worked into their I do have a Lord
of the Rings tattoo on one arm, So I mean,
I can't get that far away from it. But that
to me, like when I think about my past, there's
certain very important events happened to me while I was
in England. I've only been in England a few times,
but all the times I've been have been pivotal moments.
(08:09):
My honeymoon was in England, for example. I spent a
week with very close friends in England where we all
learned interesting things about one another and got hopelessly lost.
All of these moments just kind of pulled back. And
even though I've spent more, way more time out of
England than in it, I feel like I could cram
(08:30):
pretty much everywhere else I've been into this fictional map.
I think that mine would like a little bit like Phillery.
And I don't know if you guys have read the
Musician's trilogy, which is wonderful. Just finished up the last
one and I'm sad love grossmend right more. Please. My
map is hand painted, and it's hand lettered, and it's
(08:52):
probably a little bit off scale. And the house where
I grew up in is kind of Castle Lake, and
they're various figures who are important in my life back
then and still are today, and they're kind of gathered
around the castle, and then we go out into the wilds.
You know, here's New York City, a tiny dot that
was pretty pivotal in my growing up years, my twenties. Uh,
(09:15):
and here's Atlanta. I mean, actually, I think it would
be a map of the east, the East coast, but
it would be lovely. It would be a lovely map
of the East Coast of the United States, and one
that really has no relevance for anyone else. I think
Alison's map features Philary and this place is similar to
mine in that Narnia is a fictional place and it
(09:36):
figures as a backdrop in my life. Map The Lion,
the Which and the Wardrobe was one of the first
places my mind could reliably retreat to a fantasy land
that explored what it was like to be a child
shaped by the forces around her. And in that respect,
each of us has a bit of the fictional world
woven into our autobiography. Yeah. Well, if I had to
(10:02):
make an autobiographical map of my life, in terms of
what it would look like, I would think back to
earlier medieval maps, where fast expanses of the known world
hadn't been explored or discovered yet, so you'd have these
old maps with vast expanses of empty land and empty
(10:24):
ocean where it was blank, nothing was really there um
And usually those parts of the maps are where you
would find all of these monsters. Um. They kind of
represented the unknown, so they were placed in the unknown
portions of maps. That's Toronto based artists Bailey Henderson. She
brings mythological secreatures from medieval and Renaissance maps to life
(10:48):
in her ongoing sculpture series Monstrom Marines. In her research,
Bailey was struck by one particular map, the Carter Marina,
drawn by Alls Magnus. In it features a bestiary of
marine animals, the kinds that sailors would trade stories about,
beasts said to tear a ship asunder and plunge it
(11:08):
into the briny depths. One such beast is Zivious. This
bronze sculpture depicts a bird faced worka with a dorsal
thing that can slice boats in half. And it turns
out that this kind of land and sea animal mashup
(11:29):
is common and the Renaissance it was a common belief
that all of the animals presented on land had their
counterpart in the sea. So on a lot of early
maps and text you would see creatures like a sea pig,
or a sea dog, sea lion, a seahorse. They are
just completely ridiculous creatures that obviously didn't ever exist. But
(11:53):
it's quite an amazing, uh, the imagination that early artists
ad when they were depicting these creatures. Here with these
maps we see Bailey's imagination working spatially, willing these two
D beasts into a three D sculptural existence, which is
in stark opposition of what we do in real life.
(12:16):
In real life, we survey our three D surroundings an
attempt to freeze them into a tableau, compressing the details
to what we wanted to look like. And in this
way there's an interplay between one is real and what
is fiction. To me, all maps are fictional. It's important
to when you look at a map to kind of
(12:37):
ask yourself the question, what has he or she decided
to leave out? What rhetorical messages being given, even the
ones that people think are you know, this is the
most scientifically accurate piece of cartography. I'm John Hessler. I'm
a specialist in modern cartography and geographic information sciences Here
(12:59):
at the Library of Congress, Geographic Information System g i
S is changing the way we take in details from
the world. It's like mapping on steroids, allowing us to question, analyze,
and interpret data to understand all sorts of relationships, patterns,
and even trends. So g i S and and modern
(13:20):
mapping are really an attempt to kind of abstract from
this huge, complex, multidimensional um mess that is the world
um and to visualize what's actually happening. An example here
is crisis mapping in after a devastating earthquake hit Nepal,
it took only forty eight hours for volunteers to map
(13:41):
incredibly useful data, like areas that had passable roads to
get supplies to and from, and areas that had given
way to landslides. This is a kind of humanitarian ground
swell of technology. My interest in cartography has always been,
at least in modern cartography, is how do we use
this data to help people. My involvement with crisis mappers
(14:04):
UM and and and the humanitarian mapping world is all
about that, to kind of plan for things that are unexpected,
things that are happening and changing rapidly. Almost everything that
we humans do is never an equilibrium. It's always changing.
A city is a thing that used to be thought
of this kind of the stable UM place, but it's not.
(14:26):
It's the transportation is moving, there's energy going in and out,
there's all kinds of things happening. UM. How do we
plan that to make people's lives better. That's not to
say this kind of technology is perfect. While on the
one hand, there's this this really beautiful side of you know,
what can we do to UM use this technology in
(14:48):
order to improve people's lives, to plan better, to figure
out how to deliver fresh water to people better, to
um plan all of those kind of resources and agricultural
land use and all of that stuff. There's also that
that negative side that the more of this data that
gets out there, of course, the more information that that
other people have about us UM government agencies and and
(15:10):
that kind of thing marketers UM. So there's the there's
the double edged sword there in this sense. G I
S mapping is Pandora's box. Will never be able to
stuff it back in and close the latch, and we
probably wouldn't want to do that even if we could.
After all, it's changed the way that we move through
the world. People use it to pick hotel rooms. They
(15:32):
go and they look at what the orientation of the
hotel is, and they, you know, decide what room in
a hotel they might want to stay in based on
the view that they can see on Google Earth. UM.
And so I think it's taken the difficulty of wayfinding
out um. In other words, the space of wayfinding, the
anxiety of finding your way has has kind of disappeared.
(15:53):
Where we're all on our phones, um, looking for the
Starbucks that's a block away with our little GPS and
our smartphone owns or or anything like that. We we
no longer have to wander about looking for anything. And
the spatial aspect of mapping has exploded, spiraling out and
influencing every sector of technology, even game design. Take Minecraft,
(16:17):
for example, a game that looks deceptively simple with its
basic survival premise and block architecture to build shelters with.
But it turns out that Minecraft is really sophisticated and
it requires a lot of spatial and problem solving skills.
It's taking advantage of a certain cognitive way we perceive spaces. Um.
One thing, when you build a Minecraft space you're kind
(16:38):
of moving through it. And I think that's an interesting,
uh cognitive way to look at at at mapping. Mapping
usually is a space that someone is moving through, that
people are moving through, but in Minecraft, um it's especially
important that that people can move through the space that
you're building. Disability to throw off the shackles of space
(17:00):
may help to explain the fanaticism of Minecraft players. And
I think it really does compartmentalize a certain um, a
certain fantasy we have about breaking out of what is
our normal spatial box. Um. Humans have always wanted to
kind of like throw off space, throw off this this
(17:21):
this geometric thing that kind of keeps us down and
keeps us in place. That one thing that humans can't
do is flyes. And I think these things kind of
play on that. John's life is in maps, and this
has changed the way that he sees the world. Now
we can do real time mapping, Now we can do
stuff that's updating itself, you know immediately, and and and
(17:45):
looking at that, and the way that changed my worldview
is is that I now look at the world as
never in equilibrium, that there's never anything that's not changing.
Everything is in motion, everything is happening um. Everything is interactive,
everything is connected. Maps are contours of the human experience,
(18:10):
laid out on an emotional grid, And in those contours
we consider location, distance, history, people, and whether we want
to go there or have been there, whether we once
stood on a mountaintop picking out the Big Dipper from
a wreath of brilliant stars hanging overhead, or whether we
dreamed it or flew over it on Google Earth, moving
(18:30):
through space and time in our minds. Think of all
the ephemeral maps you leave behind each day, the physical
and digital footprints marking your paths, and the stories these
routes tell about where you are in your life and
who you are in your life, the outward evidence of
your inner wayfinding. We've mapped the bloody universe and pinned
(18:55):
it in a net, but as for dots of humans,
we've made no progress. Yes, The Stuff of Life is
(19:24):
written and co produced by me Julie Douglas. Original music
and sound design is by co producer Noel Brown. This
episode also featured tracks from the album Mechanical Advantage by
The Cubists. Editorial oversight is provided by Head of production
Jerry Rowland. Excerpts of hireby Dragons is by Felix Dennis.
We'd like to thank John Hessler for revealing the illuminating
(19:47):
ways in which we map the world. You can find
out more about John's work at Warping History dot blogspot
dot com. Thank you to Bailey Henderson for discussing your
research into medieval and Renaissance maps. Check at her sculpture
series Monstro Marines at Bailey Henderson dot com. And thank
you to Alison Ladermilk and Jonathan Strickland for sharing your travels,
(20:09):
real and imagined. If you like what we do here
at the Stuff of Life, visit us on Facebook and Twitter.
In the meantime, email us a drawing or a description
of your autobiographical map at the Stuff of Life at
Housta works dot com.
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