MapMap Vauxhall by Benedickt Groß transforms OpenStreetMaps to match hand drawn mental maps of a neighborhood. Where the NYPL’s Map Warper conforms historical maps to the base map of web mapping services, MapMap makes the mental map the new base map.
MapMap presents to me an intriguing opportunity to bring conceptions of historical media networks and infrastructures archived in the minds of the people that constructed, maintained, or operated them to a map. What would the city look like from the perspective of a 311 phone operator, a cable repair person, or a newspaper delivery person? How do these perspectives change the base map?
In the warping of web mapping service base maps by these personal mental maps, we might see the city anew from uniquely situated techno-historical perspectives.
I just reread Latour’s _Reassembling the Social_, in which he emphasizes the importance of taking seriously various actors’ accounts of how a network is constructed, how it comes into being, what forces move it — and the actors that comprise it it — into action, etc. These individual mappings are just as much a part of what constitutes the network as are “objective” maps of the networks’ infrastructure. The project you describe here allows us to graphically represent the various conceptualizations of the “network” that collectively shape what an actor-network is.