Mapping Hacks

Use Your Track Memory as a GPS Base Map #55

Chapter 5, Mapping with Gadgets

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HACK

HACK

#55

Use Your Track Memory as a GPS Base Map Hack #55

Use your own past traces to provide you with context for street navigation

and low-rent GPS maps.

Newer GPS devices come with many megabytes of memory to store base

maps. Companies like Garmin and MAPSource (http://mapsource.com/) sell

CDs compiled from public domain data and some proprietary data to load

onto your Garmin device, providing you with context for where you are:

roads, names, places, and often small recommendation databases for local

services.

These GPS base maps provide context and help you to navigate, but some-

times they interfere with your own story. And other times, for various rea-

sons, there are no maps for where you are going. You can use your GPS to

create your own base map out of your tracklogs and waypoints.

Turn Off Your Base Map to Turn On Your Own Story

Maps tell stories, and the stories that maps tell both reflect and create real-

ity. Our experience of a place is created, or altered, through our interactions

with maps. We sit surrounded by our wealth of cartographic data, and we

forget ourselves and our own stories in favor of the authority of an external

mapmaker.

The base map in your GPS reflects (someone’s) reality, but it isn’t your

story. You build your own story over the course of your travels. Storing

tracklogs and setting