Chapter Six - Digital Cartographies as Playful Practices

Summary

Where was I?

My neighbour recently looked up a Google Street View image of his tattoo parlour in Amsterdam. He noticed that his bicycle was parked in front of his shop, so he gathered that the specially equipped cars that made the panoramic photographs were traversing the city on one of his working days. Becoming intrigued he returned to the map and looked up the school of his children whom he always picks up on his non-working days. On the Google Street View image a crowd of parents were gathering outside the school building. So he figured that the picture must have been shot at the end of the school day. His bicycle was nowhere to be seen and therefore his presumption that the cars drove through the city on one of his working days must have been right. He then looked up his home address on the map and saw that his car was not parked in front of the building. Did his wife go somewhere that day? On the square in front of the house he noticed a huge billboard with posters for the European elections. So now he knew that the Google cars must have been visiting Amsterdam around June 2009.

The story that my neighbour told me is a strong case in point of what I want to discuss in this window. What my neighbour did here was constructing a spatial story through the use of digital maps. He actually tried to reconstruct two spatial stories at once: that of his own movements (and of his wife and children) and that of the movement of the Google cars. That his stories may hinge on the arguably wrong presumption that the Google Street View Cars covered Amsterdam in one single day is of less importance here. More important is that he got intrigued with the possibilities of digital cartographical technologies to construct spatial stories. Furthermore my neighbour did not create any story, but a story about the whereabouts of himself and his family. So his endeavours to create a spatial story were closely bound up with his (social) identity.