Memory maps
October 7, 2006
Earlier this week, I dropped in on a discussion about physical and digital spaces (blogged elsewhere by Peter and Mike K.) that ranged pretty widely over topics related to geography and location-based data. At one point, Jeff showed us Flickr's geotagged map of Route 66, which put me in mind of an exhibit I saw at the Library of Congress last year that featured a few nineteenth century postal memory maps.
These maps were drawn by postal carriers to help them remember their way around the western territories, and often bore only a cursory relationship to physical geography. They served more as mental maps that invoked the memories of people, historical markers and points of interest as a way of navigating an unfamiliar landscape.
This seems like a good historical examplar for the kinds of things people are doing with social mapping these days: overlaying personal experience onto geographical maps, and in the process transforming the maps from static reference tools into living social documents.
> More about postal memory maps
File under: Informatics
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