Lab 3 : Neogeography

Here is my map of Lyon, France, which highlights where to discover the Roman and Renaissance past of the city, the most delicious gastronomic restaurants & cafés, and the best entertainment. All of the locations are from my own experience and memory as a student living in the city for a year.


View Abroad in Lyon, France in a larger map

This was my first time making a map online, and it was interesting to be able to recreate a place anywhere in the world online for others to experience (with photos, videos, and URLs). My map is like the ultimate photo album/scrapbook. Instead of just having photos and perhaps some hand-written descriptions of the places I discovered while abroad, I can add the geographic locations of each photo and videos as a way in which to interact with the places even after returning home. I can even show distances between places and map out walking routes and areas on the map. If I had seen a map like this before leaving for Lyon, I think I would have really appreciated it. But at the same time, it would perhaps have taken the fun out of discovering these places on my own, spontaneously.

Despite the possibilities Google Maps opens up, I found some problems with it. For example, the walking route is automatically drawn and it would not select the streets I wanted it to, and certain places (ie. cafés, landmarks) are marked on the Google Map but I have no idea how they were chosen and I think that many important places are left out while other not-so-important places are included. More importantly, the Google map doesn't show topography, which is really important in a city like Lyon, where the city is dominated by two large hills. These two hills are important to the city's past; combined with two prominent rivers, these topographical features played an important role in the choice of many ancient peoples to live there, including the Gauls in the 5th century BC. Due to both the possibilities and problems of Google Maps, I think there have been and will continue to be many consequences, both good and bad. One of the biggest consequences I see is that as more information is put online, less of it will exist in a tangible form. For example, sometimes I would prefer to sit down with an actual book than read it online. The same can go for a photoalbum or trip diary. I think that humans can find technology novel and appreciate it, but I think that we will still sometimes want to experience things tangibly, in reality, and so it's important to maintain a balance with the cyber world and reality.