minnesota maps

The MHS is currently presenting an exhibit called 'Minnesota on the Map' and you can look at maps from their collection online if you click here.

satellite view

I was just using google's satellite images to look at the area where I got lost on my first day of kayaking and - yes - google does show a left-hand channel that simply runs out and that isn't marked on the DNR's map. (It's circled here in red.) I'm sort of interested in this section of the river because, at that point, the picturesque qualities of the landscape were very far from my mind...

Here is Where

reading the paper this morning I came across an article about this project, which is cool, I think...

zeemap problem

I'm not sure what's happened to the zeemap. The gadget seems to be displaying the default demo map rather than our annotated one. I've just been to the zeemap site and our map is definitely saved - it hasn't been lost - so I'll try to work out what's up with the display later today.

maps in the 1600s

I've started reading Gary Clayton Anderson's book, Kinsmen of Another Kind, on 'Dakota-White Relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1650-1862'. (I mentioned it here.) In the early chapters, he discusses the state of the Sioux, western and eastern, in the late seventeenth century and this leads him to talk about early maps of the Upper Mississippi made by French explorers and cartographers. In particular, he focuses one by Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin, which dates from 1697 and includes information from Le Sueur's exploration of the Mississippi from the mouth of the Wisconsin River northwards into what is now Minnesota.

Unfortunately, I can't find an online version of the map of 1697 but the Library of Congress offers digitised versions of other maps by Franquelin here, here, and here.

I particularly like the second one :o)

beautiful strangers

regarding my suspicion that there might be a secret map embedded in Bob Dylan's iconic 1965 record, Highway 61 Revisited, for the moment I'm letting that go. The only town names mentioned are not along Highway 61 or the Mississippi River: Juarez and New York City (both in Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues.) but it's really great to revisit this record: you can listen to it and read the lyrics here for free (great website, wow...)

in his pretentious 24-year-old's liner notes, he does manage to usefully say: "the subject matter -- though meaningless as it is -- has something to do with the beautiful strangers . . . . the beautiful strangers, Vivaldi's green jacket & the holy slow train..." 

(I like imagining red haired Vivaldi in a green jacket, too...)

Mississippi Blues Trail

great talking with you earlier, Richard! here's an example of the kind of map I would love to have as a layover on our own map, sort of like that anatomy book with the sheets for blood and lymph and muscles I remember from my childhood...

Mississippi Blues Trail

also, I think Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited might be its own secret map of the Mississippi as well, I'll look into this soon.

The Dakota

Since it is the Minnesota part of the journey that I'm going to do, I've been giving a little more attention to that stretch of the river and I think the interaction between settlers and Native Americans, particularly the Dakota, is going to be very interesting.

Having written before about hand-drawn maps I was delighted to find this beautiful one, drawn by the missionary, Samuel Pond, in 1834, when he and his brother, Gideon, first started to work in Chief Cloud Man's village near Lake Calhoun. There they devised a way of writing the Dakota language - the 'Pond-Dakota alphabet' - which seems astonishingly obliging of them, given our previous discussions about alphabets and transcription. Like a lot of missionaries, the Pond brothers went into a kind of self-imposed exile in order to bring Christianity to the people they had chosen as 'theirs' (although admittedly Fort Snelling wasn't very far away). But, a few years later, Chief Cloud Man and his people were forced into a more radical exile because of conflicts with the Ojibwe, who themselves had been displaced by settlement further east. There's a good site on the Pond brothers here.

ideas of mapping

I'm in overdrive this morning but this will be the last post today, I promise :o) The idea of wandering and making a map as you go - whether a cartographic document in a literal sense or a sort of mental map that isn't actually expressed as a diagram at all - has quite a long tradition of its own. I've just read a book called Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley. It's very focused on London and Paris, but covers a range of interesting figures from Daniel Defoe and Thomas de Quincey, through Walter Benjamin and the Situationist International, right up to some contemporary wanderers (very British ones, I have to say) like Iain Sinclair, who undertakes strange journeys in and around London and has written about them in books like Lights Out For The Territory and London Orbital.

(Interesting that Sinclair took the title of his book, Lights Out For the Territory, from the end of Huckleberry Finn - it's what Huck does *after* his Mississippi journey.)

memory

I very much like that idea of an eclectic range of material being *layered* onto a map, which - I agree - seems like a beautiful image of human memory. I've recently been reading Le Jardin des Plantes by the French novelist, Claude Simon. It was his last novel - he published it in 1997 when he was 84 - and it represents a wonderful attempt to express something of the texture of human memory within the scope of the novel.

It consists of a series of recollected fragments and often he will return to the same material in a new fragment, developing it slightly or altering it a little in the way we do when we recall moments of the past. The fragments are not uniform in style - in fact they vary considerably - and again that evokes the lack of uniformity in actual memory (some memories are vivid; some are vague; some are detailed; and others are sketchy outlines). There is a pattern of assocation among the fragments, so the mention of, say, a tap in one fragment will be echoed by the mention of a tap in the next, even though the memories are otherwise unconnected. And there are sometimes multiple blocks of text on the page, bringing different fragments into some kind of assocation that is not explicit but implied by the structure of the page itself. Of course these page layouts aren't maps. But they *are* map-like in that they organise memories visually. Here's an example:



Maybe my description makes Simon's novel sound so avant-garde as to be unreadable. But the extraordinary thing about it is that it's *very* readable, despite its unusual organisation.

Thinking about a work that evokes the structure of memory in its own form made me think of Simon's novel, which has impressed me a lot.

mapping again

Excellent! I'm glad that the idea of mapping appeals to you because it's really fired my imagination too. I've sent for Annea Lockwood's sound maps and am very much looking forward to exploring them. (I have some memories of the Danube from travelling in Austria, Hungary, and what was then Czechoslovakia as a student.) I'll post some bits and pieces on maps but I'll put them in separate posts to keep it all clear.

Annea Lockwood: Sound Maps

I am totally into this mapping idea, and thank you for finding Zeemap: GREAT to have that tool available to us!

Regarding maps and rivers and sound, you definitely want to know about Annea Lockwood, who made a piece called A Sound Map of the Hudson River in the late 80's, and recently did one of the Danube. I really love her work.

The metaphor of making a sound map of the Mississippi is a good one: going down the river, I imagine collecting/creating multiple layers: actual sound documents of the river like Annea's, interviews like say the WPA writer's project, sound recordings of musicians like Alan Lomax. then there is a journal/blog/podcast (of words, music, visual images, and whatever else) of our responses to what we experience, which is ALSO in some way an archive of exile, because we ourselves are travelers in a more or less foreign land. (and if this project continues the way I'm fantasizing, there's a further layer created by the performances/collaborations that happen traveling back UP the river in this spring/summer of 2010.)

I think the idea that all these disparate kinds of information get layered onto a map is really rich. something about a map as a metaphor for the brain, how memory gets layered on the brain.

(and I think our informal tagging has already earned its keep!)

mapping

Bloody hell! I've just noticed there's something really interesting going on here with maps. Forgive me if this is obvious - I can be a bit slow :o) Quite a while ago, I posted this on mapping and transcription as analogous ways of capturing subjective experience, and then, when we began to talk about the Mississippi, you posted this on the soundmap of NOLA, which, incidentally, uses zeemap, the same technology I'm talking about here. I think we really need to pursue this - the idea that the journey could result in a kind of experiential map of the Mississippi seems extremely exciting to me (and, by the way, a great thing for a joint group of artists and academics to be thinking about...)

Zeemap

I like your idea of inserting notes into a map rather than just a document, so I've created a zeemap and embedded it in the right-hand column. (Click on 'visit larger zeemap' to see a version at a more useful scale.) I'm not sure if I've got the settings right, so you might want to mess around with it for a bit and then let me know how you got on. (Zeemap have developed a great resource but they really need to sort out their 'help' material!)

thrilling...

okay, I've just gotten off the phone from our discussion of turning the River Project into our Archives of Exile project: I am SOOOO excited: I think this is just a great idea for so many reasons! having you as my collaborator on this is exactly right! I'm so laughing that we didn't think of it before!

so here's the first link I want to share: a "soundmap" of NOLA: we could use this as a model for a constantly accruing soundmap/AudioBlog of the river journey...

http://opensoundneworleans.com/

Hand-drawn maps and transcription

On the phone last night I was talking about the idea of asking a number of people to transcribe the same recording of speech and I suggested that it would be like asking people to draw maps of their neighbourhoods. The point really is to capture their personal, individual, subjective response to a place (in the case of maps) and to a voice (in the case of transcriptions). There's a great website run by the Hand-Drawn Map Association, which offers a wide range of scanned images and gives a flavour of how amazing people's personal maps can be...