Rediscovering a City through the Memories of Others

If you had to map your life in a city, how would you go about it?

When I think about this question, I think of all the places in my city, St. Louis, that have impacted my life and the memories I associate with them. I think of the neighborhood I live in now, next to Tower Grove Park. Right down Grand Boulevard is the place I spent four years,my alma mater, Saint Louis University. There are the restaurants I love and the museums that have helped me grow into a professional. Stretching past boundaries into St. Louis County is the town I was born, Swing Around Fun Town where I ran around every summer, and the baseball diamonds I used to play on. For every memory I’ve listed, there are probably a hundred more.

Humans naturally connect memories – of people, of events, of feelings – to places. They don’t even have to be places that still exist. Spaces hold power. This thread flows through two essays on mapping – “How to Play with Maps” by Bethany Nowviskie and “Where Are The Best Stories? Why Is My Story? Participation and Curation in a New Media Age” by Steve Zeitlin.

Nowviskie advocates for a playful usage of maps, unbound by the traditional strictures of cartography in order to convey meaning. Though the first few pages of her essay discuss the limitations of GIS technology when it comes to mapping in the humanities, her primary example comes from the handwriting book of a schoolgirl from 1823, based on one innovative school teacher’s philosophy. It revolves around connecting passages to hand-drawn maps of each of the states, then 19 rather than the 50 that we know today. For example, 14-year-old Frances Alsop Henshaw drew a map of Ohio that pinned a place where a famous soldier died. The author also speculates that the inconsistencies in the lines on her map of Virginia could be because of the tensions between the state pre- and post-slavery.

Playing with maps in this style allows an individual person to create their own interpretations of space and place. This method is inherently subjective, but Nowviskie does not see that as a bad thing. She also notes that this method does not require any fancy technology. This idea really inspires me and makes me think about the possibilities in exhibits – playful mapping could be a great interactive to allow visitors to participate and share their stories.

The second reading, by Zeitlin, is all about sharing stories. The main question it raises is how do you decide which stories are the most important to include? The examples I gave of my connections to the spaces and places in St. Louis are incredibly important to me, but would they make the cut in a professional map? Could they be featured in an exhibit or a digital history project?

Zeitlin’s project, City of Memories, maps the memories of everyday people in the city of New York. They handle the tension between curation and participation by featuring both curated posts and community posts, once they’ve cleared an editorial hurdle. It currently exists online, but it started with large Styrofoam maps of NYC’s five boroughs that visitors could pin memories to. For someone as technologically-illiterate as me, it is always great to see a reminder that digital does not always mean better. Setting hundreds? thousands? of memories pinned onto a large map could be a very compelling image.

Online or on-site, mapping spaces and places allows us, the public historian, to preserve the memories of the celebrity and the common man alike. It also presents a thrilling opportunity. To paraphrase Zeitlin, these mapping methods allow us and our audiences to rediscover our cities through the eyes and memories of others.