Autobiogeographies

The first Place most people put on the map when they join Platial is home. It might be where they were born, where they live now, where they lived when they were growing up, all the places they have ever lived, where they might live in the future. All of these are ways of thinking about home.

Origins, for better or for worse, are defining. They are one of the important ways in which humans organize information about the world, and especially about the people they encounter. Knowledge of people's geographic origins are repositories of information, impressions, prejudices, images, and preconceived notions of all kinds. It is incredible how useful these can be in navigating a cosmopolitan social world and how heavily we draw from them without even realizing it most of the time. It goes without saying that this human dependence on incomplete and flawed repositiories of goegraphical/anthropological information can also get us into trouble, but especially when one is aware of the limitations and the flaws, it mostly serves to make a person more socially adept. The more a person knows about other cultures and Places the wider the person's potential overlapping social spheres.

Think of the last 10 people with whom you have socialized. Do you know where they grew up? Where they were born? I noticed recently at a party I went to that within a couple hours everyone knew where everyone else was from.

If knowing how to interpret this kind of information is an invaluable skill, then also is knowing how to impart it. Humans are constantly striving to control the message of their their own identities, whether consciously or not. What we tell, how we tell it, and when...
Watching the story of someone's life plot itself out in space and time on a map is one of my favorite things to do on Platial. I've always been fascinated by stories, and these autobiogeographical maps are a new kind of story, or rather the same old story we are always telling, but structured in a new way. They are another tool in the construction of the story of self. Another piece of the documentary so many of us are constantly creating about ourselves.

Comments

[Dennis Yates]

Basically, places aren't that important to me, at least not as defining characteristics. It's more of the things I have done at the places that are important. This is probably because I grew up as a military brat.

I was born in Kent, Alabama in 1969. Before first grade, we had already moved out of a trailer and into a few sets of apartment in Montgomery. Before I graduated high school, I lived in 5 states and a foreign country. As of now, I have lived in (as far back as I can remember) 27 different places, and hopefully will get a different job in a different state so I'll have to move again. (The job I am at right now doesn't pay me nearly enough to survive, much less thrive.)

There has never been a place I could label "home" with the meaning "a place that I and/or my parents will always live at." Home, to me, has been a rented place where I couldn't change anything major about it.

[garyjwood]

Here's another data point. The farther we are from home, the more general we are in describing it. Here in Toronto, if someone asks where I live I give them the nearest major intersection or subway station. When I'm in the USA, Mexico or Caribbean, I'll probably say just "Toronto". I also meet people while on vacation who say they're "from Toronto", but really they're from one of the sprawling exurbs some 50km from where I live.

[jason]

garyjwood's comment about the detail/distance ratio is interesting in the context of these mapping apps. If you really just want to mark Toronto as a city, you still have to essentially place that marker at some very specific spot, we don't have any 'dull' markers yet. Area (polygons) as Place-like objects would take care of that, but would bring up other issues around overlapping data, circumscribed data, etc. But these are challenges we're excited to take on. Imagine a 'dull' marker, that looked normal from a distance, but as you zoomed closer in, it gradually morphed into something more along the lines of an 'area marker'. Just thoughts.

[Tracy Rolling]

Dennis--I lived in the same town for 18 years before starting to move around. My parents still live there and I don't think they will ever move. But I would never call that Place "home."

What a word.

My husband has moved around a lot all his life and has a passport from a country in which he has never lived. When he was about 30 we moved to the Belleville neighborhood in Paris and he told me that for the first time in his life he felt like he was home and that from now on when people asked him the confusing question, "Where are you from?" He would reply, "Belleville."

[divageek]

I am adopted, so my sense of home and family is split between two groups; my biological family and my adoptive family. I am using this site to help work out what is the essence of me, who I am where do I belong, what is home. Boston and MA were my origin points. My biological mother gave birth to me in Boston. At the time she lived in Pittsfield MA. My parents found me sometime in 1968 in Springfield MA and I went right back to Boston. This was my first circle.

My family moved to NJ when I was about 4 (1969). The town we resided in I called home for the Lion's share of my 40 years. We moved to MN in 1974 only to find ourselves back in Hightstown NJ in 1983. I had moved to PA, then back to Hightstown. Trenton, then back to Hightstown. NYC then back to Hightstown. My son attended the same high school, hung out at the same places that I did as a teen. It gave me a great sense of home and belonging. This is my second circle (a few times over). I finally had to give up the ghost when a divorce and high taxes forced me to leave 'my hometown'. The fact of the matter is unless I hit the Power ball, the chances of me moving back there are slim to none.

[Circus]

Home is such a slippery concept to me. I'm a military kid, so my family moved around quite a bit when I was growing up (not as much as some folks I've met, but more than the average American). I spent so much of my childhood wishing that I had grown up in one place, just like everyone else. And yet now, as an adult, I still get the itch to move to another place entirely about every three or four years.

After moving several times as an adult I've come to realize that there's a moment when a place becomes home for me. It's the moment, while moving in, when my bed is put in place and made for the first time. I'm already looking forward to experiencing that moment again.