NACIS 2015

Personal Story as Map
Brenda Laurel, Neogaian Interactive
"'Sometimes,' said Arkady, 'I'll be driving my "old men" through the desert, and we'll come to a ridge of sandhills, and suddenly they'll all start singing. 'What are you mob singing?' I'll ask, and they'll say, 'Singing up the country, boss. Makes the country come up quicker.'"—The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin

As the daughter of a city planner, I spent a lot of my youth looking at maps. My dad would guide me through them with stories. "Here is where a Black neighborhood was shattered by a freeway." When I was a foreign exchange student in St. Brieux, the mayor pointed at a map and said,"Here is Omaha Beach where the gun emplacements were 200 yards farther south because the Resistance member who was measuring the distance with the turn of her bicycle tires got a flat." Decades later a colleague showed me areal photographs of the Southwest saying, "we think this is one of the the trade routes between the Ancient Pueblo and the Maya." A friend of mine who is a self-proclaimed "Antarctican" tells me that her community is starting to believe that personal story is the best way to communicate the science they study. In this talk, we'll look at stories of maps and maps of stories, thinking about new ways to design them.