Sunday, December 6, 2009

Geographer of Story - Back in Vienna

In 2006 Molly and I rode our bicycles from Praha to Vienna. Then Molly went to visit Leah in Germany and left me in Vienna for a week. I camped at Camping Wien, on the other side of the Danube, and bike 'commuted' into Vienna for a week of exploration, photography, and creating GPS Traces.

While we were writing Mapping Hacks, a year and a half earlier, Schuyler and I had these long discussions about annotating spaces.

At one point we were driving around Sebastopol in the middle of the night, testing a little geoannotating hack, pulling over at random places to write code and debug, and generally having the sorts of intense and wonderful conversations which Schuyler and I had. And I started to geoannotate a spot as being the spot where one of us had said something clever.

"Wait," Schuyler interrupted, what is the point of georeferencing that point? And I was still in my full pompous mode
and I repeated my line that 'I am interested in the geographic component of the things which people do,
and that everythig that people do, say, think, or experience we do, say, think or experience in a place.'


"Wouldn't it be cool to track epiphanies? To create maps of where various
thoughts occur? To learn if we have better thoughts in the mountains or in your
office?"

Spending a week alone in Vienna was a tranformative experience. And while riding near ( 48.205369°, 16.431298° ) I had this thought that really what I wanted to do was be a 'Geographer of Story.' (In reality it was about a 100 feet away from that spot).

And now I am back. In Vienna. With lots of waypoints from the past, half realized photographic ideas, more stories to tell, and
a FREAKING GIGAPAN and a 12 foot C Stand.

How cool is that?

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