Chris Cummings @ ITP

Mobile Mapping Museum

Group Members

Erika Block
Chris Cummings

Overview

The Mobile Mapping Museum is a mobile exhibit about seeing, understanding and creating maps of real and imagined spaces.

The exhibit will map its own journey.  In addition to fixed, onsite mapping activities and experiences, visitors will contribute to an evolving mapping and storytelling piece that connects people from different places around the world, within the physical space and in an online space.

The project will gather location information on visitors and the exhibit sites for use as source material for both the evolving exhibit and the online portion of the project.

Why a Mobile Mapping Museum?

Exhibits

Based on a developmentally-specifc sequence of activity areas that address the National Geography Standards,  various activities will be designed for different age groups, ranging from 3-12 year olds.

The Locatomator Device

The database of stories, images and sounds is built using the Locatomator device. It is a digital recording device that you can use to tag your location while recording video, sound and still images.

 

Supplemental Media

A dynamic web site serves as a learning and community mapping hub, with activities, reference materials and a growing database of related maps and stories.  There will be opportunities to connect with people from different locations who choose to participate in an evolving online mapping process, whether or not they’ve been able to visit the physical museum.

Community Outreach and Mapping

In the words of the Common Ground Community Mapping Project:

“There are opportunities at every grade level to use map-making as a flexible and fun educational tool to develop a wide range of student skills. Map-making fosters holistic thinking, provides opportunities for collaborative decision-making and builds links between schools and community.
 

Sponsorship/Co-developer

We have identified a variety of commercial and educational institutions to partner with in order to help realize the technical and logistical challenges of this project.

 

Why a Mobile Mapping Museum?

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We’ve been thinking a lot about maps and the stories they tell, not only about the places they locate, but also about the people who make them.  Denis Woods writes that maps are as important for what they don’t include as for what they do include.

Our sense of the world is informed by narratives of the places we inhabit, so it’s not surprising that kids are fascinated by maps  - whether by creating cities of wooden blocks or lego, towns made of Fisher-Price animal barns, Barbie’s Dream House and shoeboxes, or the Hogwarts maps from Harry Potter.

Maps are pictorial stories, they’re personal, they’re specific without being literal.  They’re great for stimulating imagination and visual literacy.  They create opportunities to make social connections and explore multiple perspectives through juxtaposing different maps of a single place, or similar maps of different places.

The Mobile Mapping Museum introduces kids to mapping their own spaces, reading other people’s maps, seeing how their maps connect with others, the idea of converting real spaces to representational maps and the storytelling that is a part of this process.