Mapping Hacks

1

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Mapping Your Life

Hacks 1–13

Fiction authors, when first starting out, are often advised to “write what you

know.” The same rule applies to telling stories with maps. If you are new to

creating geographic narrative, we suggest looking to the nearby and the

familiar for inspiration and information. As a result, our story begins with

“Mapping Your Life.”

The spatial rendition of your personal narrative can take many forms. Sim-

ply locating the important places in your life on a map, or identifying the

highways and byways that lead to those places, can serve as a basis for geo-

graphic exploration. But telling your own story to others means being able

to make your own maps, however simple and straightforward, of the places

you live in or have visited. Going further, we can try to place other elements

of our lives on a map, such as photographs of our adventures, in the hopes

of bringing new life to the old tradition of vacation photo slideshows.

In this chapter, we’ve tried to focus on hacks that you can start experiment-

ing with right away. For simplicity’s sake, many of them are based on exist-

ing software or online services, but, as the book progresses, we’ll try to show

you how to get your hands dirty building these same basic tools and con-

cepts on your own, with more complexity and expressiveness. Let’s get

started!

HACK

#1

Put a Map on It: Mapping Arbitrary Locations

with ...