Just hit a milestone of 350,000 stories for a cultural atlas. Only Wikipedia has more English entries.
Food and Music were key themes. Food to reach stories not expressed in English words. The 2nd & 3rd largest encylopedias are in Chinese and Spanish.
Virtually walking around the world to learn things is faster than than by foot (I started by walking around one block in Greenwich Village collecting music stories). I was meaning to go more by foot at 300,000 entries (surpassing a German encyclopedia, 4th largest in world). But then the pandemic came.
You have to learn so much just to even see invisible connections and roots anywhere. Until then, we are blind in a world of our own. A narrowness at the heart of so many misunderstandings.
Had to browse a billion words to distill 20 million words for geographical notes, scanning 60,000 biographies. The joy was the geographical illumination, to deeply understand what happened at a place, what made a neighborhood and what highlighted a journey. There was so much unnoted cross-over between biographies. That's where the real history is. The invisible made seen.
There's a poetry in combing through life to create a collection of experiences to live life. That's the current focus. How to explore all this geography in post card poems, mixtapes and scrap books. Travel expressed like haikus. Parts Untold.
