New Maps Of People
I spent a few hours this afternoon at the “London: A Life In Maps” exhibition at the British Library. Fascinating stuff, and I thoroughly recommend it. It’s a brilliant way to look at the history of London.
It’s actually a slightly broader thing than it sounds, starting as it does with the earliest known depictions of London, on Roman coins, and starting with what you’d have to pretty charitable to call maps – river panoramas, the precursors of maps, generally the view looking North from Southwark, because 95% of the river is over there. It does rather put the London North/South divide into perspective to note that for about three quarters of it’s existence, South London ended at Borough High Street, this despite the fact that the area I grew up and, and now live, have been settled for most of that time.
But I digress. This and a few other things have got me thinking about digital maps. A way to chart one’s personal topography. While at the exhibition, I sms-ed a quote that made me laugh to my Twitter log. I take photos all over the place. I blog, or have blogged, from more than a few places. The photos are now stamped with a place, thanks to Flickr’s mapping service, although that’s really all I’ve got in the way of geo-located data.
But I got to thinking, have “twittered” (god, that’s an ugly term) from the middle of an exhibition, wouldn’t it be interesting to have a device that dumps your timestamped GPRS co-ordinates on-line every hours or so. Hell, give it a crappy phonecam like camera and clip, and in a lot of places it’d be perfectly possible to attach a picture as well. It’d dump it to a website automatically, and the website would filter the thing, so that instead of a load of photos of the same place, it just tracked new locations.
You could have a log of exactly where you’d been and what you’d done on a given day. (Yes, privacy concerns, big brother issues with tech like that are all quite real. I don’t know I’d want to do it all the time myself, and I’m in the guy who has a side project in basically logging his entire digital life…)
But where it gets interesting is that with a clever designer, you could get some really interestingly mapped data out of it – imagine a personal atlas, where places are spatially related by how long your spend in them. And then to relate your maps to those of other people. Suddenly it becomes possible to provide a digital topography of our planet that has nothing to do with its physical space, but at the same time is not simply an arbitrary construct.