Stop 1: Idea Ever since reading Michel de Certeau's "Walking in the City" (1980) several years ago I've been very attracted to the essay's central metaphor: the city as text. His proposal, or at least what I took from it and ...Read More

After Tanya showed us the fun-but-unnavigable synergistic map gizmo FourWhere I became all the more skeptical with regards to slick, corporation-commissioned interactive mapping projects, but I have to say that the FedEx Experience is really very interesting. It might be ...Read More

One of the great challenges of my research has been deciphering the handwriting of late New York University history professor Bayrd Still (1906-1992), a frequent creator and leader of walking tours throughout Downtown Manhattan. One of the walking tours that ...Read More

One of the major primary documents I'll be incorporating into my mapping project is a series of photocopied handwritten index cards that I only recently finished deciphering. The nearly illegible and poorly re-printed script belongs to Bayrd Still (1906-1992), an ...Read More

One of the walking tours I'm mapping, from Carol J. Binkowski's book Musical New York (1999), starts with a surprising story from 1736. It has nothing to do with a musician, composer or singer, or even a performance venue, but ...Read More

As I headed to Tribeca on a recent research trip to follow two of the walking tours I’m mapping for my project, a pair of free podcasts released by The Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting in 2009 that ...Read More

In honor of World Toilet Day (November 19, apparently) the British household cleaning product company Domestos commissioned designers from Lean Mean Fighting Machine to create Flush Tracker. As the name implies, the site maps the journey of flushed water in ...Read More

Just a little something that I spotted today and thought I'd share rather than squish and wipe up: Roach Map is a visualization created through a collaboration between Hacks/Hackers NYC and Eyebeam. While this may not initially appear to be ...Read More

The user-generated website Mural Locator was created to situate works of two-dimensional public art at any location in the world–provided of course that it’s accessible on Google Maps. Though seemingly designed specifically for the geographical cataloging of official and historical ...Read More

Note: When I wrote this proposal my plan, or the idea I thought would become the plan was that I would try to amass as many walking tour itineraries, accounts and maps as possible to see what parts of New ...Read More