29 December 2008

Personal Map

I'm always interested in ways of mapping, especially how people move in spaces. This is a gps map of my movements since christmas. It includes driving my younger brother to his girlfriends, exchanging a duplicate present and metal detecting in a field of my dads. I love how individual this map becomes. In some ways it is very similar to a road map, but it only borrows certain elements, it becomes a narrative and quite personal as well. The more often you drive a certain route the thicker the line becomes, so building data and creating hotspots. Obviously this is just a few days of relatively mundane events but even so it is easy to see the potential. GPS also records information such as speed, altitude or just about anything you want.
To look out for on this map are the straight road that is involved in most journeys (an old roman road, the a14) and the two hotspots, at my house and cambridge town centre. The distance between these two points is about 12 miles.