Final Project Rough Draft

Rough Draft Layout for all to see. It printed out very nicely at Kinkos on a white card stock (and it only took thirty minutes!).

I focused my argument on how going from an edge city to a public transportation town forced new cognitive and spatial ways of thinking, causing me to associate more with landmarks (or what I call imaginative landmarks) through a process of cue learning (association with landmarks) as opposed to viewing the landscape as one region and associating only with routes (as from the interior of a car). This helps argue for more pedestrianized cities in the US by showing the transition from one to the other is possible, by highlighting the benefits of a diverse transportation  city, all while escaping the clutches of the automobile.

My maps are mostly about how I perceived my new urban environment. I tried to highlight how it appears in my head through metro transit, bus routes, and cycling, keeping it all very personal. As Dan pointed out, Ortelius is a great program, and I would recommend to Dr. Petrik to go ahead and devote a class towards it in the future. Non-Mac users may still want to explore it in the Mac lab. I would have been lost without it.

I kept my design fairly simple. Lindsey and I thought that it would work best on a simple white background, more in tune with the metro aesthetic. I was able to get a font call Futura from a friend that is the basis for the London Underground font, so it very closely resembles the very plain yet recognizable sans-serif font that the WMATA uses. I tried to follow CARP (contrast, alignment, repetition, and proximity) as closely as possible, not skewing too much in crazy design mode. The first two pages almost mirror each other, while I tried a bit more image-heavy design on the third page (similar on the fourth page as well).

Anxious, yet excited to receive some constructive criticism on Thursday in class. Can’t wait to see everybody’s work!

It’s All Coming Together…Sort Of

Bicycle Route to Work at The Newseum

This is a map I made from a service called Ride With GPS. It basically lets you map your bike routes and share them with others. The nice thing is that it also gives you elevation information, user feedback, etc. What I was thinking about for the final project is taking a simple Google Map of DC and mapping various bicycle, on foot, bus, and metro routes. Probably using Ortelius or Illustrator.

Some of my research discussed spatial thinking in a more psychological manner. Something I found very interesting was how people use references and distance relationships with those references to get around.

“The more one visits a place and navigates around it, the more landmarks one notices, the more one codes multiple relations among those landmarks, and the more accurate and confident one’s codings of distance and directions become.”^[1]

This got me thinking about when I moved to DC and had absolutely no idea where I was. I would come out of Metro stations and be completely disoriented. It wasn’t until I started to explore more on foot, bike, and bus that I became more familiar with my two neighborhoods. Traveling underground by train left me with no familiarity about my new city, only with reference points for the metro stations themselves.

I’d like to explore this more, but I’m having a hard time integrating this idea with my research regarding the development of DC transportation and how that related to race and class. More black, lower-income metro users ride MetroBus. I’ve found that a lot of the twentieth century urban redevelopment had a beautification tint to it. Should I talk about how using different forms of transit outside of automobiles informs my spatial thinking/familiarity of a new city?

1Huttenlocher, Janellen and Newcombe, Nora S. Making Space: The Development of Spatial Representation and Reasoning. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.

Comments

This week I looked at Alisa and Ruel‘s  project ideas and tired to help Cara out.

Comments

This week I empathized with Dan on SketchUp troubles. Alisa had a very interesting archaeological post, something I’ve been talking about in my Historic Preservation class.

Ortelius Attempt

As I mentioned in class last week, I downloaded Ortelius and so far, it’s pretty useful. They really have labored to make mapping as streamlined as possible (as seen in their tutorials).

Here is my first stab at using it. I have mapped my highway route when I moved half way across the country.

Any and all feedback welcomed. The roads were very much like using the Pen Tool in Illustrator; you had to work the curves and could manipulate them as you wanted. The text, I feel, can make or break a personal map like this. Any other meta-text or information you think would make this more interesting?

And also, if anyone thinks Ortelius would work well for their project, I’ll happily let you use my machine for a bit (within a reasonable amount of time of course). Just throwing it out there.

Comments

This week, I found Lindsey’s personal maps to be a great way of exploring personal geography and thought Cara’s analysis of mapping the US was interesting.

Imagninations in Maps

One quote particularly struck me in Padron’s article “Mapping Imaginary Worlds”. On p. 284 he states:

“…all maps are, in some sense, maps of imaginary worlds in that all of them involve a process of selection, representation, and conceptualization that inevitably falsifies the territory they represent, even as they communicate valuable information about that territory. In this way, the production of a map introduces the values and the prejudices, the perceptions and the misconceptions, the insights and the blind spots, the ideology and the culture, of the mapmaker into the representation of the territory.”

In the vein of Harley, this seems to throw all bets out the window. If this is true, then I feel like we’re right back where we started in the beginning of the semester at the discourse of whether maps can be trusted or not. But, as seen in Padron and You Are Here, not all maps are trying to be ‘definitive’. Interpretation and imagination does not automatically lead to illegitimacy or a somehow lesser usability for historians. I think it mostly depends on what types of historical questions you ask.

But getting back to this quote, it got me thinking about my project. My last post showed a project that manipulated the London metro map to better represent actual space, time, and distance. If Padron is on the right track, transportation maps shouldn’t be taken as definitive and literal. I was thinking about the DC metro map and how much it schews distance and time. Metro Center and Gallery-Place are really close to each other, but Dunn-Loring and Vienna are not, but on the map, how could you know this?

I am toying with the idea of mapping my commute from my different DC neighborhoods vs. my San Antonio commute to college by re-representing the DC Metro map or a Google map. Illustrator? Ortelius? Any suggestions of how I could go about this?

Also, Dan’s post reminded me of this track, and I cannot stop humming it as I do my blogging.