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beautifulbutch
note on morning subgroup: mapping ideation session
Key ideas:
- Global vs. local engagement: Our sense tells us that the local matters, our logic tells us the global matters, and how do we scale up?
- There’s an appropriate level of engagement at every scale
- Today we’re learning to read maps via making maps—is this a new phenomenon? How do participatory tools and mindsets allow us to link creative and critical engagement?
- We need to consider the real demands of the classroom, where it’s not always possible to foster the kind of engagement you can get by traversing a community.
- A key idea is how region and boundaries are defined (ex: sub-saharan africa)
social justice
-the subjective and the material; “there’s an objectivity to maps that isn’t really the case;” maps as anchors of a subjective sense of self and world; maps, over time, can accrue information/experiences and is collaboratively built.
“what I’ve been trying to think is how to inject this subjective racial social logic to a sense of place. In a way, I see them connected.”
overtime an accrual of meanings, so,here, it’s trying to think about maps as a subjective phenonmenon: “map is verb and a noun.” “deep mapping” example; “personal stories as a gps, how they can give you bearings.”
-maps, social justice, social issues, how maps can validate kids own experiences; getting away from the link of maps to a sense of ownership (forging new associations for the idea of maps)
-maps as a form of writing— not just reading maps, but what you accomplish when you write them; mapping as hacking (what we call appropriation); today we’re learning to read maps via making maps.. combining many forms of knowledge
tagging,
-the question of scale (local/global; the micro or nano/macro; what’s in between? how can we use tools to feel a grasp for the global and begin to get ahold of it (and what does getting ahold of it look like); we have a sense of being able to grasp the local, can we get a same sense for the global & what about the inbetween? interesting middle scales… [key idea: there’s an appropriate level of engagement at every scale.]
-need to keep in mind the real demands of the classroom; what is possible right now. talk about good sites and tools.
-How geography is discursively constructed. The five themes: ended w/ a discussion of region. this is one of (5) themes of how geography is constructed: 1) location 2) place; 3) huamne nvironment / interaciton social interaction/environment; 4) movement; 5) region. Might these these notions defining geography change as we think about new media and technologies?
Katie: Start with biggest and abstract
Juan: Subjectivity and maps: Walter Benjamin quote (Katie): There was always a sense I was doing projects with kids where we took maps and made stories about those maps, including narratives. That subjectivity of the location gave way to other issues, which are political, economical, and linked to sense of place. Subjectivity and issues in my book belong together. Because what I fear sometimes with all these mapping things is that they strip—they become more like data readers than anything else. And what I’ve been trying to think is how to inject this subjective racial social logic to a sense of place. In a way, I see them connected.
Juan: It’s the idea that you’re actually on the ground and traveling.
Jesse: Embodiment
Eric: I agree. What kids it’s being sold in this great standardization of maps, whether digital or ptined, is that there’s an objectivity to maps that’s not really the case. More people use googlemaps or even a rand mcnally atlas and are being sold that myth. I think it’s important to bring subjectivity back into the conversation. Taught an architecture program that asked students to describe the route from home to school that wasn’t covered in the map as described.
Katie: YOu can get them to go somewhere if you can get a sense of the starting point. You have this personal sense of place.
Juan: With these maps we did with kids, when you start to see what they brought to it, it was—my neighbor sells pot. There was a lot of screaming on the street i live in. There was a car burning last week. In this corner is where I get bullied…etc. Their personal narrative allows you to start bringing it to questions of, say, why don’t you have vegetables in your corner store? Why do you have so many fast food restaurants? Why is it a high-density area? etc.
Jesse: Deep mapping: Research into antiquarian studies of place in great britain. A blending of oral testimony, personal narratives, hand drawings, embodied knowledge about a place constituted a map of that place. chorography
William Least Heat Moon: Put togehter a large publication tied to travel narrative
Annotating a map:
Clay: Everyblock project: clusters blog comments by location
Eric: The tendency is to think graphically—but how we tell stories doesn’t have to be graphic. it can be text related, too.
Erin: What is a map? When you talk about deep mapping of a town, that took prose form, yes? I never thought about it that way. Anything one reads that really kind of focuses in and around a place, even if that’s out sailing, it’s an expression of an idea. We’re using lines or letters or images or clay, or…
Clay: Map is a verb and a noun.
Juan: I was doing a project called Fallen Fruit. (With environmentalist collective) They were locating public fruit trees in L.A. They didn’t want to actually make a map, because they felt that maps themselves carried a sense of ownership over a location.
Think about evolution of maps of the Americas, and how they were to a degree subjective.
Paula: Doesn’t mapping give a common language to other people? What was the goal of mapping fruit trees?
Juan: The tree could be on private property, but if there’s a branch that overhangs the street, they can take fruit from those areas.
They also provide info on where fruit is coming from. fallenfruit.org—direct relationship with a physical community.
Erin: When do you use a map in a traiditonal sense? When a community is not yours.
Juan: In a sense, you don’t need a map to map.
Eric: I was seeing the blog as a kind of evolving map. It was given to the participant as a way to construct the curriculum or propose what we would talk about, and that’s one kind of map of ideas. Giving students a way to participate in construcitng their reality, to understand that they can do that.
Paula: From a teaching standpoint, start with what the kids are vfamiliar with, then the goal of the teacher is to then take them out so they do have to start learning about things that they aren’t familiar with.
Katie: I wonder if we can change the metaphor to “bringing it in.” In some way, can you bring this to your map?
Paula: That’s where kids are—in themselves, already. That’s where they live.
Juan: I agree—it’s up to the teacher to find a connection to that subjective internal understanding of space or personal history.
Paula: We do have these things you want these kids to know about. I teach in a pretty wealthy district and the kids have no idea what things are like in a third world country. The kids could take pictures—Have kids take pictures of the phenomenon of school (all the detritus), then shock them into the places they live (slums in 5 different continents) and click on how people live. You can s
Jesse: I think we could talk about the skepticism about media. What’s it like to experience the places we live site vs. experiencing the spaces in their community? I think that there’s maybe a different type of experience / value that can come from being in physical environments, vs. exposure to mediated environments online. I see new media literacies as the recording of experiences can be shared through time, but it always has to be done through real experience.
My Town: It’s a lived real experience, a live map.
Paula: I teach 125 kids a day. What are the logistics of having real experiences? There’s some realism that sometimes I hope will go into this guidebook. There has to be a realism to what public schoolteachers are asked to do. And as budgets fall, I teach 5 civics classes. It’s exhausting, at the end of the day, plus planning, plus I teach a topic that I don’t take out of books.
Eric: I wonder if a middle way of getting to the physical tour is by using new media to consturct itineraries of these tours. Use technologies to assimilate the reality.
Juan: One of the things that I thought was a nice way of claling it, when I read the pamphlet you created, was the word “soft curriculum.” I have done a lot of mapping projects with kids, and they’re all outside of the schools. One of the problems we’ve had is figuring out how to convince a school to use things like this to teach something pragmatic or very basic.
Katie: Cost of Life
Juan: How can you use mapping to teach the issues in general?
Erin: The big idea of investing in one thing can be useful.
Paula: They mapped the polls based on geographic area. The kids had already decided whether they were dems or republicans. Lots of maps where you could play games on where the electoral college could come out.
Tagging locations—I want to tag unemployment.
Eric: Hacking—not a way of appropriating info negatively, but
Jesse: You start with your own place and get to know your own culture, but what becomes clear very quickly is that you learn your place is entwined with other places
Puaula: I never have kids make a physical relief map. I always have them layer something on to that. It’s a map that shows congressional districts. I used to use tissue paper, etc. There’s always an issue overlaid. Thematic maps
Clay: I think a lot about scale, and my background was as an artist first, and scale for me is like the way that we
At every scasle there’s an aqppropriate level of engagement
Local stories to representative democracy? Is there something people can engage in on different scales?
Larger scales result in democracies.
Challenge: Tackling bigger issues as scale gets bigger
Paula: Micro / Macro Contacts with one that’s near and one that’s far
The out isn’t someone else’s problem. The local vs. the global. The personal is political
All politics is local.
Jesse: I’ve been thinking about scale recently, too. We think about these two poles (micro / macro), but we have unbelievable degrees of nanovisibility now. We can see the whole world now, too. In some way, the inbetween is often now passed over. We tend to emphasize something extremely mciro or extremely macro, and I wonder what’s lost between those two poles.
Erin: i think that’s slightly oversimplified.
Hyperlocality leads to global connections
Paula: One of the 5 themes of geography: The idea of region. People usually think “Africa, the western area, the rocky mou8ntain area, etc.” You can also say a region is a place that shares attributes.
We care about the middle area: Our sense is that the local matters, our logic says the global matters, but how can we span the difference?
Eric Region: that’s a critical lesson in how geogrphy is constructed. Region is not necessarily applying political boundaries; it’s not applying any specific type of boundary, but more of a way of connecting things.
Erin: It’s interesting to unpack the constructions: For example, “sub-saharan africa.” What’s true and what’s false? What are we obscuring by just calling it a region?
