110: Mapping

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On Halloween 1982, I walked around the neighborhood and photographed all the jack-o'-lanterns. In most cases, the photograph is of the pumpkin on the porch at that location, but where my photographs didn’t turn out, we duplicated an image from another porch.


THIS IS AMAZINGLY AWESOME.

Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps the traditional way—by drawing things we can see. And other stories about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world redrawn by the five senses.

Prologue.

Ralph Gentles and five other people spend each summer creating a map of every crack, every depression, every protrusion, every pothole in the sidewalks of New York City. We hear why, and we hear all the things their map does not include. Mapmaking means ignoring everything in the world but the one thing being mapped, whether it's cracks in sidewalks or the homes of Hollywood stars. And, according to cartographer Denis Wood, we live in the Age of Maps: more than 99.9 percent of all the maps that have ever existed have been made in this century. (5 minutes)

Act One. Sight.

Denis Wood talks with host Ira Glass about the maps he's made of his own neighborhood, Boylan Heights in Raleigh, North Carolina. They include a traditional street locator map; a map of all the sewer and power lines under the earth's surface; a map of how light falls on the ground through the leaves of trees; a map of where all the Halloween pumpkins are each year; and a map of all the graffiti in the neighborhood and of who was mentioned most often in the neighborhood newspaper. In short, he's creating maps that are more like novels, trying to describe everyday life. See some of Denis's maps.

Denis Wood is author of The Power of Maps. (8 minutes)

View officialthisameric anlife's map

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This is a map of the sewers with their manholes as well as the gas and water mains running beneath Boylan Heights. The fire hydrants, of course, are aboveground.

Act Two. Hearing.

TAL contributor Jack Hitt visits Toby Lester, who has mapped all the ambient sounds in his world: the hum of the heater, the fan on the computer. (11 minutes)

Song: "Way over Yonder in the Minor Key," Billy Bragg and Wilco


Act Three. Smell.

A story about a device that charts the world through smell—and only smell. TAL producer Nancy Updike visits Cyrano Sciences in Pasadena, California, where researchers are creating an electronic nose.

This story was prepared in the form on an FAQ. (9 minutes)

Act Four. Touch.

Deb Monroe reports on how she has been mapping her own body through her sense of touch. (9 minutes)

Act Five. Taste.

Jonathan Gold goes to the places on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles that he visited back in the early 1980s. He tells the story of how he decided to map an entire street using his sense of taste, and of how it changed his life.

Song: "I Love America," Noel Coward

For Full Episode:

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1211

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