Image above: Mapping famous deceased.
Related links to Spatialworlds
GeogSplace (a teaching blog for Year 12 geography)
Geogaction
Spatialworlds website
GeogSpace
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
manning@chariot.net.au
Where am I??
Adelaide, Australia: S: 34º 55' E: 138º 36'
Mapping everyone and everything
Increasingly sites are appearing on the Internet that show that there is an unquenchable appetite to create a map of almost anything in any place. Here are just a few interesting sites that log-into the significance of place - as the resting place of the famous and the literacy nature of a place.
We know where the bodies are buried ... take a virtual tour of world cemeteries that host famous artists and rogues.
This site was launched during the last Haloween period and was sold as:
"Commune with the dead this Halloween, and
check out the final resting places for more than 50 of history's most
iconic figures. This eerie atlas lets you explore the lives and deaths
of actors, authors and outlaws via maps of famous graves, from Bob
Marley's mausoleum in Jamaica to Mary Shelley's tomb in Dorset."
Books and place
This site gets one thinking about what it means for a story to not just be from a place,
but also of it, and why it is that some places have an abundance of
literary riches, while others don’t. There are plenty of maps pairing books with
states in the United States, but those maps tend to signify the fame level of the books
rather than their literary merit; they also tend to be dominated by
white men, most of them dead. The best book for every state map comes up with a list which is more than just a general reflection of a place.
No one book, after all, can completely capture the spirit of
something so unwieldy as a state. Few—if any—books can even completely
capture the spirit of an individual. And yet there are those stories
that so beautifully evoke a time and a place and a way of life that it
becomes close to impossible to separate the literary perception of a
place from its reality—one winds up informing the other.
Illustration by Sarah Lutkenhaus
Another more localised literary map is the literary map of Brooklyn,
highlighting the books that are considered as best representing the neighborhoods in
which they were set.
An interesting link between English and geography that should be explored!
Megacities interactives
Whilst on about a city, the following interactive map of megacities is worth a look.
By 2025, the developing world will be home to
29 megacities. The interactive map explores the latest UN estimates and forecasts on the
growth of these 'cities on steroids', and takes a look at the challenges
and opportunities megacities present for the tens of millions living in
Lagos, Mexico City and Dhaka."
