Davis Dartboard

The new O’Reilly book Mapping Hacks has arrived in the campus bookstore; it looks excellent. I haven’t picked it up yet since supposedly I’ll be getting an email giving me a 30% discount on it and the related book Web Mapping Illustrated by virtue of going to the conference last week. The former book is by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, and Jo Walsh, who are quite active in the ‘locative media’ movement. Here’s a game which I may play which is very much in this spirit.

I’ll take a city map of Davis and drop down a couple dozen random points on top of it (all in my GIS, of course). Then I will go to each point and sketch/photograph/write about what I see there. The results of this exercise will end up on this blog, on separate web pages, and/or in a physical book.

Thanks to the Davis Wiki, this town is perhaps one of the most extensively annotated-on-the-web places on the planet. And as it turns out, the city has a comprehensive set of GIS layers that are freely downloadable, not to mention a set of detailed aerial photographs dating from a couple of months ago. But GIS layers and imagery only get you so far. I’m sure I’ll learn things about this town through this exercise, and perhaps catch glimpses of deep culture as well.