"Deep map" literature explores more than a 2D image of a place.
William Least Heat-Moon, who wrote in the genre, drove 13,000 miles in 1978 living in a van.
"I was heading toward those little towns that get on the map--if they get on at all--only because some cartographer has some blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi, Igo, California (just down the road from Ono), here I come."New York Times wrote, "he took to the road and went to Subtle, Neon and Mouthguard, Ky.; to Dull, Weakly and Only, Tenn.; to Dime Box, Tex.; Scratch Ankle, Ala., and Gnawbone, Ind. He wrote a book about his travels in order to find out where he was trying to arrive at and called it Blue Highways (1983), because on old maps the back roads were colored blue."
The intriguing aspect of his venturing was discovering the blind spot of America. It was also new way of seeing geography, history, and people. A new way of exploration. That's the key.
A "deep map" offers far more depth than Google Streetview. It's beyond wading in shallow waters of cartography. And that's what I want as a traveler or cultural explorer.
So how do we add points of interest meaningful to personal taste? That dives into the idea of how discovery itself is personalized.
Lately been exploring the idea of "digital gardens." In a nutshell, think of your bookshelf or record collection, but connected to other living rooms -- other private collections, representing personal taste. Culturally-related networked collections.
Like your identity-expressing, curated living room, items are swappable to refresh your display. Like plants, your personal exhibits decay and grow again.
Now imagine if everything in your living room - your personal collection - was tagged and networked with other "digital gardens."
Your collection of jazz records might be connected to someone else's Paris photo collection, featuring jazz club Cave du 38 Riv. Here's what you think is special. It's both personal and identity forming.
The dynamic swapping within a collection and cultural connectivity to other collections create both refreshment and spontaneous discovery lacking in GPS apps to date.
Your collection is an ever-changing "living identity." And cultural traffic between gardens is also dynamic (like Waze) not stagnant. There's something new to arrive at over time at every garden. Newly collected items also create a new cultural tree like in ancestry. They can branch into other digital gardens.
The next question for me is how can these "digital gardens" be culturally-connected meaningfully to enable an interesting journey down a rabbit hole. Finding cool things that fit my tastes and interests today.
How do I get to discover gypsy caravan travel in less travelled roads is still possible on the Irish coast? You can indeed live like a gypsy by lakes, streams, woods and beaches through Ireland's Wicklow Mountains, fishing and reading books, with pub stops and shower stops.
But how did I even get there - to this point of discovery? One thing led to another after a thematic exploration. And ultimately I entered my blind spot to find interesting things.
"Seeds" in common can define how gardens connect to other gardens. A common experiential heritage led us here.
You can hang glide from the world's largest urban rainforest and land on the beach in Rio De Janeiro. You leave Tijuca National Park, air-bound for Sao Conrado Beach.
In common with caravan travel, there is adventure, water travel and transformative scenery. That's the shared "story gene." The shared experiential vibe.
This Cultural DNA defines how you might playlist something into the same mix and connect your experiential playlist (your collection) to another DJ (someone else's collection). That DJ in turn can connect to another digital garden. This expands your own discovery.
Cultural DNA defines how to thread a compelling personal collection meaningfully into another personal collection.
A traditional digital garden (if I can call it that) is connected to another digital garden by personal choice. But to link two digital gardens, you first need to actually find the other collection and make the call they are fit to be connected or married.
That led me to ponder the idea of an augmented hashtag for matchmaking - a blending of multiple tags - for more interesting cultural connectivity. It's almost like astrology, being able to read the signs.
Some embedded tags can be visual in nature, some geographic, some time-related, some topical, some contextual and others narrative-driven, all together defining a story gene (a blended hashtag). A smart tag. The deep tag.
In music there are no more than 450 unique genes. Musical phrases. Song recommendations are born from related music genes. But what about geographical or cultural experiences? The sensational poetry of sights, sounds, feelings, tastes, and scents have many combinations. How many experiential vibes can be defined?
This reduces the problem of sifting through an infinite volume of stories. My current GPS collection has already surpassed 333,000 stories. Much of it biographical with a recent focus on food and music. Not all equally relevant or interesting. Some ancillary, just there to augment location understanding (or biographical geography). Some outstanding to see. Some only in a certain context become significant.
Blues Mafia Godfather James McKune believed the perfect Blues collection had exactly 300 records. No more, no less. He would swap out records over time to perfect his collection of "rarities." Taste is also time-sensitive. We don't like something equally over time. What we value changes. Improvements are continuous. So is our personal display.
I like the idea of a digital garden being a finite personal collection that's swappable. It's compact and connected to other compact collections. All dynamic and evolving. Regularly branching into other digital gardens to expand discovery.
The Blues Mafia would get together on Saturday nights and trade stories about their Blues collections (the first liner notes to grow the value of a collection) and shared tips on how to hunt for more records -- networking people, places and stories. That in essence is the spirit of a digital garden.
Secrets of the city in an augmented map shared between collectors. A shared subculture with common story genes, born from communal conversations (cultural connectivity). The Blues Mafia in Manhattan coined the "Delta Blues" (their deep tag) and created Blues Mythology (story genes in experiential vibes).
Going deeper, there is also the idea of connecting people and places with similar story genes.
You could represent every spot in the world with an x-axis (GPS coordinates in minutes and seconds) and every moment in time in history with a y-axis (also in minutes and seconds). Every person who ever existed could be along the z-axis (by name).
X-Y-Z coordinates represent a story (deep-tagged with story genes) at a place (x) in time (y) of a person (z).
The X-Y plane shows everything that ever happened at any place over time, layered from bedrock to topsoil (what is happening right now at a place). You can understand how we got here from the layers of a place over time.
The connections between people and places (X-Z plane) graph related geographic/demographic stories (with story genes) between people. Here are all the people who have stories at CBGB over time. Here are all the other places where they have stories.
That extends digital gardens geographically past CBGB to other places. Within each place/person, there are experiences (with story genes) in common with other digital gardens, connectable by mutual deep tags.
I find the subterranean real estate of digital gardens interesting. It's like the independent old days of the internet. Social media does not control this real estate online. It's user-developed individuality like MySpace or WordPress, fit for "personal" collection. It's more creative. It does not condition the human mind to see and do the same thing over and over again everyday in a template repetitive way for more than a decade.
This is no prefabricated fixed environment. It's ever-changing in look and feel, with expanding tools to create inspirational displays. The most popular human activity is not a like button but discovery. It's not persuasion technology but independent thinking, improvisation and exploration. It's freedom.
