It has been like 14 years since my last school project with the topic – “Mapping the invisible”. Honestly, I no longer remember the development of my project based on the mapping technique. Luckily, I had the chance to attend this informative talk about Circulative Mapping – organized by Hanoi Ad Hoc and RMIT Vietnam. The talk was about how Hanoi Ad Hoc’s research team collects data to create maps. They also introduced a tool called GIS (Geographic Information Systems) which allows users to input data to generate different kinds of interactive data visualization maps.
Overall, I like the map projects that were showcased in this talk. It’s interesting to see an interactive map telling different layers of story based on how users interact with it.
So, 2 takeaways encourage me to find my way back to Map & Mapping technique.
Notion of mapping
Mapping is a way of representing information that is not physically connected.
- Information can be anything like traffic flow, material flow, water, time,…
- Information can be collected by hand, by photo, by interview,…
- Information can be in both digital and analog data.
Mapping the invisible
My question to the speakers was “How do you collect information that is invisible and represent them on a map?”. Hints from speakers were:
- Data collection: For information that can not be seen like memories or feelings, you can talk to people and listen to their stories. You then ask them for “keywords” that describe their memories and feeling.
- Categorization: Connect and categorize the keywords together based on the contexts/stories from them.
- Visualization: To give the keywords more value for visualization, you can also connect the keywords with physical things like districts, buildings, streets,… (and time frame? I wonder if time can be counted as a physical thing).