In school, I didn’t pay much attention to geography. This pretty much fits the American selfcentric stereotype. I did eventually learn the difference between the Pacific and the Atlantic, though, and came to understand the hierarchy of United Kingdom, Great Britain, and England. When I started to travel, I got interested in maps. I still am. I can’t resist poring over them in airline magazines, and maps stop me whenever I come across them in newspapers. My computer desktop image is a map of the world.
My interest in maps extends further, though maybe not as far as my friend Terry’s, who has actually mapped the potential mutations of the influenza virus (or something like that), except he calls it antigenic cartography.
I also like words. And I especially like when the two come together, as in mapping words. This is done brilliantly at wefeelfine.org, which maps feelings. Specifically, it maps feelings revealed in blogs. You, the user, can specify the feeling you’d like to map, the age, gender, or location of the feeler, the date, and/or the weather the feeler is experiencing. “Mounds,” one way that wefeelfine maps feelings, are wonderful living hills of quivering colorful jelly that recoil from my curser. They tell me that 34,541 bloggers are feeling better now, 7,452 are feeling empty, 383 are queasy, and at the far right of the mound map, 20 are feeling grotesque.
The creators of wefeelfine.org also gave us wordcount.org, to show us our most- and least-used words, and everything in between. No surprise that Figueres is at the end of the scale, the 86,573rd most used word. By great coincidence, my sister Jamie and I spoke of Figueres just a couple of hours before I visited wordcount.org tonight, and looked at the end of the scale. There was Figueres, birthplace of Salvador Dali.
Phylotaxis.com is marvelous, too, from it’s interactive opening page to its culture-meets-science representation of the news. Science stories are represented as perfect squares in an ordered grid. Stories on culture are round, messy, and can’t stay still. Verge back toward science and the round icons begin to behave, grow corners, and try to organize themselves.
On love-lines.com, which maps love and hate, I see that one person, just minutes ago, proclaimed “You all know I like my fics crackish and my pairings even crackier, as fickle as I am with them.” I have no idea what this means. Perhaps it’s pornographic.
Meanwhile, Rome is busy mapping the realtime density of citizens by their mobile phones. Or rather, MIT did the project, which mapped concentrations of urban activity moment to moment, graphically showing (glowing!) as about a million people gathered at Circus Maximus after Italy’s World Cup victory.
Meanwhile, I’ve got a nice world map, on paper, on the inside of my pantry door.
