For those of us who travel for a living, or who live to travel, getting lost is an important part of journeying.
Being lost can be stressful, of course. But it also wakes you up. You stand a little straighter. Your eyes and pores open. You become more alert. You study the world carefully, scanning the horizon for landmarks, signs, clues — for a way forward. (Sometimes, you backtrack.) But ultimately, you become alive to possibility: a new compass bearing, a new story, a trail untaken. Being a little lost can be a good thing. Being found all the time is overrated.
Walking 63 miles through Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I had less chance than usual to experience the benefits of lost-ness. I was obliged to rely almost exclusively on a GPS device to navigate and record an accurate walking track for our new digital map feature. In future urban traverses (scores of metropolises sprawl en route) I look forward to consulting more humans. This increases opportunity for serendipity. And I invite your help.
As the project’s team of cartographers and technologists continually improves the Out of Eden Walk mapping platform, our goal is to increase public input. Future city walks will welcome the suggestions of local residents — or anyone, really — to help me find interesting and hopefully non-life-threatening routes through the world’s vast ecosystem of neighborhoods. We hope that schoolchildren in particular can pitch in. Our two educational partners, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Project Zero at Harvard, are excited about sharing the walk’s mapping potential via their learning programs. Finally, we also are swapping ideas with the interactive storytelling gurus at MIT’s Media Lab on how to create mapmaking opportunities using Scratch, a programming language that helps children learn to think creatively.
So: When I stop, befuddled, at my ten-thousandth street corner to ask directions, it could be you who points the way.
The narrative map of Paul’s route through Jeddah was produced with the collaboration of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT, the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University, and National Geographic.
