Map Critique: The Lit Mapper Project

For my map, I chose the LitMap Project, a map created by Mike Pickett, MA in Publishing and Writing, Emerson College. The project is intended as a tool for people to discover new books based on location. Members, or Litmappers, enter data into the map, creating pins. The base map is a Google map, and has very little overlay or interface tweaks. It’s very straightforward, which is a good thing. When you navigate to the map, you’re presented with a simple map, covered in pins. Each pin represents a book, or a place within a book. I came across the LitMap Project while watching the film “Patience (after Sebald)” by Grant Gee.
The message of the map could be summed up as “Discover your world through literature”. The LitMap Project about page describes the map like this: “LitMap will be a great resource for you to discover great books about the places you love”. The idea here is to create a map of the places you love through literature. The founders seek to create a map that combines both fiction and non, as long as the locations exist in the real world.
This cohabitation of fiction and non-fiction could be a contentious area, bringing up the issues of acceptability in blurring the lines between reality and fiction; how does one represent these different sets of data? What tools are there to differentiate and make clear what one is looking at? These issues are interesting to me, as my own map project works with both fiction and non-fiction, and one of my first concerns was to avoid confusion and not to insinuate causality between the real and the non-real. I had hoped to find an answer for this in the founders’ blog post titled “Can Fake Places Go on a Real Map?” but unfortunately, the issue addressed in the blog is less academic and more mundane: the author provides advice on how to best determine where the fake place is located (answer: use twitter to contact the book author).
I spent some time using the map, and found it to be glitch ridden and in some points unusable.  Areas of the map like North America don’t zoom in properly, pins move and wander about the map, and at first brush there is no way to close a pins dialogue box after selecting it. Once you get through the navigation and usability issues, you can find books set in areas you are interested in. It took me a bit of time before I found the search by location option. Once I found that, the map became somewhat less frustrating. What was interesting to me is that every pin takes you to an Amazon listing. This was somewhat troubling to me, so I decided to map a book to investigate the process. After creating a user account, I submitted a book set in Seattle, Boneshaker by Cherie Priest. The submission process is simply identifying a location, book title and author. Nowhere in the submission process does the form ask for an Amazon listing or link, meaning that every pin on the map has that added on the administrator side. My link did not immediately appear, taking over a week to show up on the map.
The LitMap Project has a good premise and a wide array of potential users. Readers and explorers, travellers and writers are all potential users, as are publishers, journalists and scholars. I can imagine, with popularity and a mobile interface this becoming a kind of literary Yelp!. It has a long way to go however. In it’s current form, it feels undone and slapdash, as if the creator simply wanted to get it on the web in order to be first. It is still a new project, having been started within the last year, so perhaps there is hope that it will evolve and become a more interesting mapping tool.
*Featured image borrowed from one of my favorite tumblrs: http://fuckyeahcartography.tumblr.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *