extra credit....

While this episode of Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life focuses briefly on mapping in the traditional sense (traditional in that the product is visual), it shows the audience different ways to view the idea of mapping through sight as well as the other four senses. Before the program delves into the exploration of five different types of mapping, the host, Ira Glass makes some interesting points about maps that echo the points Barton and Barton make in the article we read at the beginning of the semester. Glass points out that every map is the world seen through a different lens, and “maps have meaning because they filter out all the chaos in the world,” ignoring everything except for the things that pertain to the focus of the map. This reminds me of Barton and Barton’s discussion of exclusion (and also Kenneth Burke’s ideas about selection, reflection and deflection based on our terministic screens). I think the idea that maps are a representation of reality that have authors, that include and exclude, that are subjective—the ideology of the map—is a concept that isn’t really addressed in schools or as people learn how to read/use a map.

In the first act of this broadcast, TAL talks to cartographer Dennis Wood about his maps of the Boylan Heights neighborhood of North Carolina. Although his maps are traditional in the sense that they are visual, the content and purpose of the maps are certainly not traditional. Rather, he uses his maps to tell a narrative about the neighborhood, through mapping jack-o-lanterns lit up at Halloween, the sewers and their manholes throughout the streets of the neighborhood, etc. As Wood tells TAL, his maps show the neighborhood as “a collection of patterns of light, sound, smell, taste and communication with others.

In TAL’s second act, Toby Lester discusses how he uses the sounds around him to map his world in Boston. As he began a new job, Lester noticed the background noises produced constantly by the machines that he used to do his job. He discovered that certain combinations of these sounds produced “positive” and “negative” sounds that affected his mood and the way he worked.

The third act of the program examined the electronic nose created in Pasadena, CA by Cyrano Sciences. The purpose of this device is to “chart the world’s objects through smell.” The narrator explained that, just as a child has to learn new smells, the nose has to learn each smell for the first time, building up a “smell archive,” so that it can have something to compare new smells to. As TAL suggests though, the difference between the electronic nose and a human being’s sense of smell is the way we process smells and relate them to experiences we’ve had.

In the fourth act in the broadcast, magazine writer, Deb Monroe discusses her obsession with mapping her body through her sense of touch. With this obsession she became a hypochondriac, looking for lumps and irregularities that could signal a disease or sickness.

Lastly, Jonathan Gold, a food critic in Los Angeles, recalls his mission to map Pico Boulevard from end to end by eating at every restaurant and food cart along the street. His goal through eating at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard and mapping the street based on a sense of taste was to help readers everywhere be less afraid of their neighbors through the medium of food. Throughout this process of eating at every restaurant, Gold discovered that a lot of ethic groups are represented in the food.

Reflecting on the mapping explored in this program and in light of our reading of Barton and Barton, I think it’s important to consider the impossibility of maps being anything but subjective. The quote at the beginning of the program—that maps are how different people see the world through different lenses—is relevant and important here. Just as I mentioned before, this idea is not one that is necessarily presented in schools. As Barton and Barton suggest, we need to be aware of this fact and consider it not only in making documents (maps, or anything else) but also in reading documents, maps, etc.