Google Maps Hacks

Chapter 5. Google Maps in Words and Pictures

Hacks 42–50: Introduction

The reason people love maps so much is that maps tell stories about places, and people love stories. Maps provide a narrative and a context for understanding the world around us. Even the most mundane maps tell a story; for example, a road or subway map’s story is about how to get around quickly.

In this chapter, we’re going to explore the narrative possibilities inherent in Google Maps. We’ll see how Google Maps can be a reading aid, how satellite images don’t always tell the full story, and how Google Maps can be mated with online photo services such as Flickr to establish a geographic context for the stories that our photographs tell. Finally, we’ll look at the user-friendly end of the “geospatial web,” where Google Maps can be used to produce and visualize feeds of information from other sources, to weave our story together into the many stories being told every day on the Internet.

Get More out of What You Read

If maps tell stories, what about the stories that tell maps?

“I lean against a USA Today paper box on Washington and Clark and think, ‘Who the hell are you to make such a claim?’” That’s the second sentence from the book Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power by Travis Hugh Culley. It is the story of Travis’ work as a bicycle messenger in Chicago. Why did Travis pick that intersection? Did that just happen to be where he was, or does it have more meaning? Where is Washington and Clark?

Enter “Washington ...