Welcome to the Map Room
In our thesis class last week, we spent time publicly hashing out what our current status is and the various problems we were encountering.
I mentioned that I wanted to take a big step back and review the core of my idea. Paul suggested that might be a bit drastic, and that my reservations about having a concept with too narrow an audience were unfounded. To paraphrase, he said that he was more concerned with having a concept that totally succeeds for a niche audience than one which is partially successful for a larger one. This was a big relief for many of us, and echoed my sentiments about where we should be heading as a class.
Another recommendation from Paul was to “find a room full of maps” and lock myself in for a few hours. This weekend I was able to do just that. I visited the New York Public Library’s Map Division on Friday and Saturday.
The Map Division at the Schwarzman Building is truly a wonderful place, and I could spend a whole post talking about it. But research first! I spent my time exhausting their public book collection, looking for titles primarily about city planning, urban design, communities and public policy, and so forth. I found quite a bit, and that was just on my own; I plan on going back and enlisting the help of the staff now that I know better what I’m looking for.
The next few days will see me chewing up and making sense of what I’ve found over the last two days. For now, I’ll leave you with a list of some Map Room highlights, for posterity:
- Rethinking the Power of Maps
- Street Mapping
- Beyond Maps: GIS and Decision Making in Local Government
- Making Community Connections: The Orton Family Foundation Community Mapping Program
- Community Geography: GIS in Action
- Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History
- Cybercartography: Maps and Mapping in the Information Era. Cartographica. Volume 41, Issue 1.
- Supporting Map-based Geocollaboration Through Natural Interfaces to Large-Screen Displays. Cartographic Perspectives. Number 54, Spring 2006.
