Mapsticulations: giving cartography the finger
There’s a funny thing that happens when people want to tell you RIGHT NOW exactly where they’re from. When there’s no time for Google or an atlas, maps sprout out of napkins and appear scratched into the dirt with a stick. Scraps of paper and objects plucked from tables are arranged like henges. In our most mobile moments, even hands and bodies briefly become maps. We are of the land, after all, so why shouldn’t some of these spur of the moment maps be made in our own image?
Maps made of scrunched up hands and arms are like the cubits and feet and paces that have been used to measure the surface of our planet for millennia. They’re often a sort of secret handshake, a shorthand, used to identify locals of a place who are united by a common need to explain the same patch of land over and over. I’ve thought about these poses ever since my family took me to Cape Cod and taught me to flex my left arm into the hook of the peninsula with Provincetown at the tips of my fingers. Later, I was delighted that I could talk to New Englanders about my Great Grandmother’s old house and tell them that she used to live just above the elbow. Oftentimes, that was all the context needed.
GIS extraordinaire and Twitter user @cartonaut coined the term ‘mapsticulation’ recently and it fit perfect. It also sparked my curiosity.
What other places have this sort of geographic sign language? Do you come from a place like this? What do you do to show people where you’re from? Would you tell me more?
What I want from you:
1. A photograph of you making your mapsticulation. We should be able to see some of your body and face- we want to see you making your mapsticulation in the wild!
2. A photograph of your mapsticulation zoomed in with a neutral background. The image should be as close as possible to perpendicular to the camera so that we can add a geographically accurate outline of the area being depicted so readers can understand the context. After it’s all done I might make it look something like this:
3. A brief paragraph explaining your relationship to this place and who you would try to communicate with using your mapsticulation. Is it for orienting tourists or just for the locals? Are you showing people where a landmark is or where you’re from? Is it a mnemonic for remembering a route? You don’t have to be from the place your mapsticulation depicts but you should have some connection to it.
Send me your pictures and text via email. Comment on this post with your name and the place you want to represent. I’ll send you my email address and you can email me your submission.
Be sure to tell me how I should attribute your submission.
Then what?
I’d like to make a blog post gallery showing off all of the best mapsticulations from around the world. There will almost certainly be a webmap involved. If I can come up with a way of making a bigger project out of this, a book for example (wow that’s a long way down the road) I’ll check in about distribution permissions but until then, this is just for fun.
OK, let’s see what you’ve got!
