Coding Taste in Geography

There is a lot to discover in your blind spot. 

A "deep map" offers far more depth than Google Streetview, beyond wading in shallow waters of cartography. And that's what I want as a traveler or cultural explorer. 

So how do we see points of interest meaningful to personal taste? That dives into how discovery itself is personalized. A new way of seeing geography, history, and people. A new way to explore interests. "Deep Map literature" is all about this - more than a 2D view of a place. 

This 3rd dimension is about digging up meaningful cultural regional data (stories, people, places) and connecting them in a way that defines their geographic influence. 

A historian or curator can meaningfully articulate data but most algorithms today do not. They are more mathematical. More quantitative than qualitative -- and limited by data inputted. 

I spent the summer mapping 750 National Geographic journeys of a lifetime and another few hundred "Ultimate Food Journeys." The connections between places made me see how culture regularly migrates and is correlated to where we want to travel. What happens in New York City spreads around the world from punk to fashion to social media. 

Geographic stories (e.g food and music history) and personal connection to them (my flavors, my culture, or something to broaden my mind) need to be curated and connected meaningfully as personalized points of interest (my interests). 

For a traveler, discovery lenses also need to be dynamically refreshed, to see new things constantly.  Connected to related "objects," not necessarily at the same spot.  Intelligent recommendations. From local to afar. 

With more interesting data, cultural "routes" become interesting like the Mississippi Blues Trail. Two places in the world with similar tastes can be connected -- like a thread connecting two pins on a map. People, food and music have migrated there from somewhere else. One book I mapped focused on how noodles spread around the world, which I augmented with notable noodle spots worldwide. It's like defining the quintessential road trip - where memorabilia and photographic milestones will be collected for a scrap book. 

Like the Michelin Guide, we must ask, is the destination worth an entire journey (3 stars), a detour (2 stars) or a stop (1 star).  In music, the artist you want to go the extra mile for is the artist you love. The longer you travel to reach art, the more important the art is to you. 

Convenient art is not always healthy. In that sense, social media does not offer any journey. Scrolling is not even stopping. Spotify offers no trip to the record store. No lingering with an album cover. Once an essential part of fan loyalty. Once part of the emotional depth we had with music. 

If we look at Places as a set of objects (a class), they typically have attributes like GPS coordinates and street addresses. And we typically just see cities or businesses named at Places projected on a map in 2D. It's flatter view of the world.

Social media and Wikipedia might augment geography with a geotag or check-in function, but at an overwhelming volume, and often shown in a way unfiltered by personal interest.

I've collected 333,000 geographic stories of interest now, all geotagged by place (people and topic tagged too in many cases), culled over 10 years. 

Living next to a library full of docs, I went deeper than the internet, as I soon realized Google and Wikipedia focus most on English stories in the West, and even then they are still short on African American stories critical to food and music. The journalists, national historians, and Wikipedia writers didn't go there.  A major blind spot. 

It's true - data is biased and algorithms amplify that. Even on maps, there's a reason why Western nations look bigger on maps. Ask yourself why Greenland looms large - it's not for its amazing Thai food today or ancient Viking migration.

To balance this, I started to focus on geographic layers of food and music stories (culling stories of the conquered and illiterate in history), and topped it off with amazing world travel stories, to yield the Anthony Bourdain view of exploration. 

But it still was an enormous volume that needed to be contextualized in niches, or combos of stories. Chaptered for episodic exploration. We need to convert volume into a starting point of interest.

Everyday I highlighted 10 stories on Facebook (less than 1% of the archive) to connect them thematically in one daily perspective. A mood. 

But no platform offered me effective tools to create a class for these connected geographic stories with common attributes. 

A "photo album" does very little to connect like a "playlist" which only exists for music & videos. And more can be done than a playlist. 

Digital Gardens (collections blogged) are starting to connect to other Digital Gardens like playlists connecting songs. Imagine everything in your living room tagged in a personal collection. It's also geographic (from some place, at some place, related to many places).  

Imagine collectors connecting each other so each collector discovers more. But today's available social platforms mostly rank posts by popularity and engagement, without curation connecting stories. And in a fixed environment of a relatively fixed friends/followers list. At a certain point, the number of friends added diminishes. 

Randomizing (shuffling) also does not work because context matters to thematically connect stories like a MixTape. That's the difference between a MixTape and iPod shuffle.  Or, a playlist vs a randomizer. A culture is represented in a MixTape, whereas any culture is repped in randomization. 

To connect stories well, attributes need to be smarter, showcasing a taxonomy of taste - how places, people and events there connect. Interests then define journeys or routes of discovery people want to take. 

We already see a bit of this on Spotify. Thematic curation defines what is heard. Genres and music genes define related songs. People with similar culture connect songs.