Pulling Places from the Pages

One of the soft­ware engin­eers at Google Book Search has pos­ted examples from his group’s exper­i­ence in cre­at­ing their own mashups. They cre­ated mashups from the places men­tioned in par­tic­u­lar books. As he states, he moved to New York and was in the gradual phase of get­ting his bear­ings and made a con­nec­tion between what he was doing and where he was. Even more pro­foundly the mashups res­ult from a con­nec­tion between the con­text of the works being cata­logued (ofter ima­gin­ary worlds, but non­ethe­less dis­em­bod­ied worlds) that have some ref­er­ence to the real world in which he found him­self. This in a per­vas­ive real­iz­a­tion and falls very much down the idea of trav­el­ing in his­tory as well and the impetus for my own Napo­leon­ic­Tour­ist concept. David Pet­rou was cyc­ling to work past spe­cific places which were noted in the works that he was index­ing and by not­ing them on maps he made a con­crete con­nec­tion between the work and the real world and fur­ther is estab­lish­ing his own sense of what his com­munity means to him. To me this has far reach­ing con­sequences that build on Kevin Lynch’s work with men­tal map­ping and com­munit­ies to, in a sense, extend these through per­cep­tion more known than seen aspects of your own neigh­bour­hood. The abil­ity to con­vey this added con­text has the poten­tial to change the per­cep­tion of vis­ited loc­ales as well by enhan­cing the exper­i­ence and dir­ectly tap­ping into the way in which we per­ceive our imme­di­ate sur­round­ing and aug­ment­ing this through this con­nec­tion of place to context.

Check out the <a href=“http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC02715307” target=_blank”>Travels of Marco Polo for a great example of a geo­graph­ic­ally broad applic­a­tion of their mashup tech­no­logy.