This morning, I want to explore some of the #DigiWriMo discussion on cartography. I’ll start off with Kay Sidebottom’s blog post, Me, mapped. In it, she references Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman. Kay focuses on Braidotti’s idea, “A cartography maps what it means to live at this moment in time. It is a theoretically based and politically informed reading of the present.”

There is a lot worth exploring in this idea and others have been sharing some interesting thoughts. But first, I want to take a detour to learn more about Braidotti. According to Wikipedia, she is influenced by Deleuze, which is no surprise for a group I stumbled across via others interested in Deleuze. Wikipedia also mentions she is influenced by Foucault, and I can imagine discussing this with my eldest daughter who would say, “Who isn’t influenced by Foucault?” Of course, if I mention either Deleuze or Foucault to most of the people that I run into a typical day, I suspect most would not know either name, except maybe for friends who live near Foucault’s Furniture Appliance in Wallingford.

Maureen Crawford added a comment referring to “Peter Turchi's book, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer.” I took a little time out to explore Turchi’s work and am adding him to the ever growing list of things to read. On post about him was in Believer Magazine; more stuff I want to read. There are also some videos of Turchi that I want to explore.

Maureen went on to write her own blog post, Musing on Maps and Minds. She writes:

“Terra Incognita – isn’t that the essence of our exploration of identity?”

She then goes on to explore Turchi, “Miles Harvey author of, The Island of Lost Maps”, another book I should read, and so much more.

She includes one of my favorite quotes from T.S. Eliot, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. ”

I first came across the quote at the end of Barbet Schroeder’s movie, “The Valley (Obscured by Clouds)”, which also seems to fit into the discussion here.

As I write this, I remember working MOOs back in the 1990s. MOOs, not to be confused with MOOCs are text based virtual worlds. You added onto your world by using the @dig command, which would create a new space and link it to the current space.

How do we map what we currently know? How do we discover new things? How do we link them to what we know? What tools are there to help with this?

I hope to explore this in more detail when I’m not rushing off to work.