For the next three weeks I’m helping to teach a class at the Presidio of San Francisco on digital documentation, cultural heritage, and interpretive trails. It’s an intensive course, 8+ hour days for the undergraduates and more like 12-13 hour days for me. For the first day, I had the students create memory maps using flickr and google maps to teach them how to use the tools, but also to teach them about free-associative narratives as a part of placemaking. It worked well as an exercise, and it was interesting to see the different scales that the students used for their own maps. I made one a couple of years ago ago about living in New Orleans, but I felt like I wanted to update it, so I made another one from Austin, linked above.
I’m also updating the official project blog, Remixing El Presidio, here:
http://remixpresidio.wordpress.com
Good fun, but I’m ready to have my hands in the dirt again!
4 Comments
May 30, 2008 at 4:29 am
Hi,
This memory mapping looks really great. We’re planning an interactive project on spiritual heritage in the city of Mechelen, Belgium. Maybe these memory maps can help us make an inventory of personal histories of spirituality and link them to actual locations in and arond the city. Hmm… you’ve got me thinking.
Great blog!
May 30, 2008 at 9:23 am
Lucky you spending time at the Presidio! I remember the bad old days when it was a military base. But then I spent a year and a half at Fort Ord during 1969-71, when it was an infantry training base sending GIs to Vietnam.
May 31, 2008 at 8:57 am
[...] Colleen describes ‘memory mapping’ over at Middle Savagery and there’s more archaeology and anthropology reading over at Remote Central who hosts this months Four Stone Hearth (some great links there but I found James Q. Jacobs paper on The Cannibalism Paradigm: Assessing Contact Period Ethnohistorical Discourse of particular interest…). And Eachtra point to the Retreive Foundations claim at a recent UN conference that ‘the desecration of indigenous lands and sacred areas continued, namely the Hill of Tara and surrounding areas’ and “so far in Ireland, there was [sic] no dialogue about the rights of indigenous peoples.’ Aren’t we all indigenous? (then again my wife’s family only came here in the 13th century so could they be considered indigenous?). [...]
June 1, 2008 at 4:37 am
Never heard about these before. Fascinating stuff. Thanks for linking me, I’ve reciprotiated.