Five ways to map the world.

Five ways to map the world. Listen to the Streaming MP3 file of the program (I liked mostly the First and the last interviews) An exrtact from the program: Here are five stories--one about people who who map the world the traditional way--by drawing maps of things you can see. The other stories are about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world re-drawn, by the five senses. Ralph Gentles and five other people spend each summer creating a map of every crack, every depression, every protrusion, every pothole in the sidewalks of New York City. We hear why, and we hear all the things his map does not include. Mapmaking means ignoring everything in the world but the one thing being mapped: whether it's cracks in the sidewalks or the homes of Hollywood stars. And, according to cartographer Denis Wood, we live in the Age of Maps: over 99.9 percent of all the maps that have ever existed have been made in this century. (5 minutes)

Adolf Wolfli - General View of the Island of Neveranger 1911, colored pencil on newsprint

Act One. Sight. Ira with Denis Wood, author of the Power of Maps and Seeing Through Maps: The Power of Images to Shape Our World View. Wood talks about the maps he's made of his own neighborhood, Boylan Heights, in Raleigh, North Carolina. They include one traditional street locator map, plus a map of all the sewer and power lines under the earth's surface, a map of how the light falls on the ground through the leaves of the trees, a map of where all the Halloween pumpkins are each year, a map of all the graffiti in the neighborhood and of who was mentioned most often in the neighborhood newspaper. He is, in short, creating maps that are more like novels, trying to describe everyday life. (8 minutes) Act Two. Hearing. Jack Hitt visits Toby Lester, who has mapped all the ambient sounds in his world: the hum of the heater, the fan on the computer. (11 minutes) Song: Billy Bragg and Wilco "Way Over Yonder in The Minor Key" Act Three. Smell. A story about a device that charts the world through smell and only smell. Nancy Updike visits Cyrano Sciences in Pasadena, where researchers are creating an electronic nose. This story was prepared in the form of one of those "Frequently Asked Questions" pages on the Internet. (9 minutes) Act Four. Touch. Deb Monroe reports on how she has been mapping her own body through her sense of touch. (9 minutes) Act Five. Taste. Jonathan Gold goes to the places on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles that he visited back in the early 1980's. He tells the story of how he decided to map an entire street using his sense of taste, and of how it changed his life. {via }