This is the era of the GV.
I coined the term "Geographical Vitae" to describe how we can now create resumes or "curriculae" of our lives (our vitae) using publicly available Geographical Information Systems.
If you have ever engaged in "mind mapping" or studied it you know that the most powerful memory tools involve spatial maps of the things you want to recall rather lists. An even more powerful technique is the MEMORY PALACE or the METHOD OF LOCI. MEMORY PALACE or the METHOD OF LOCI. This method was described by the ancient Roman scholar Cicero in his famous "De Oratore" and is also known as the memory journey, memory palace, journey method, memory spaces, or mind palace technique.
It works by having you, the person who wants to recall detailed information, assign a "place" or "spatial location" to the item you wish you memorize. Often people imagine a familiar room and then start "placing" mental representations of the things they need to memorize onto picture frames and furniture and objects. You can get down the the level of the fruit in a fruit bowl or milk in the refrigerator, discovering where you have hidden more and more specific memories by simply exploring the rooms of your house in your imagination.
In extreme situations, for memorization training, people will actually put post-its around their houses and practice moving about the rooms discovering where the memories are hidden. Lovely.
But that was the old days before we had data layer driven GIS systems!
Today we can go beyond the house and use the entire WORLD as our "memory palace".
Since we spent so many millenia wandering about the earth as hunter-gatherers we have the same kind of spatial memory that our primate relatives have and can rely on it to help us locate things of value to us.
The year I lived in the primary rainforests of Borneo, studying phenology (the flowering and fruiting cycles of trees) on the Harvard Gunung Palung project we would follow orangutans and gibbons around the then vast forests and wonder how they knew to show up at a specific fruit tree just as it's fruits were ripening. Given that the trees were scattered over a huge and complex terrain and that competition for the limited number of fruits meant you either got their first or lost the prize, we hypothesized that one reason for the huge primate brain was the creation of these mental maps that tied LOCI to experiential data correlating time and various environmental factors. The impressive EIDETIC memory shown by chimpanzees (exceeding human capability) has been shown in the lab to map onto memorizing numbers and words and pictures on a computer screen.The impressive EIDETIC memory shown by chimpanzees (exceeding human capability) has been shown in the lab to map onto memorizing numbers and words and pictures on a computer screen.
Spatial memory may be the most natural and powerful form of memory and yet, as my graduate professor of Urban Planning and Geography, Dr. Ed Soja (author of Thirdspace) argued so persuasively in class, we have "privileged time over space to our detriment".
The CV is a good example of that unfortunately linear form of organizing our experiences and thoughts.
We experience time as an arrow (or at least we are TOLD we experience it that way, ONE way) and so we create this long tree trunk in our mind and hang our life events on it like a Christmas tree laid on its side. We describe evolution this way and describe our life's journey that way, leading to a "Curriculum Vitae" that suggests some kind of causality.
When we go to recall our life stories if we try to remember events by visualizing our linear text CVs we can scroll up and down but never really find cause to find specific memories that may not follow the causal chain of events we've woven into our life narrative. Some memories were along some tributary or branch off the beaten path. How then to remember it if it wasn't a logically connected part of our oft-told and reinforced storyline?
Nonetheless, we all get the question "where were you when", right?
"Where were you when Kennedy was shot?"
That's a famous one.
"Where were you when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon?"
"Where were you when you fell in love?"
Our minds MAP events on literally MAPS.
We exist in SPACE. We move in space, we travel paths or planetlines (as my friend and National Geographic Explorer in World Residence, John Francis the PlanetWalker calls them) in GEOGRAPHY.
As a National Geographic Explorer myself I'm used to thinking geographically.
When I want to remember something I become the orangutan, VISUALIZING the forest and not losing sight of the trees because I'm not looking down over the whole mass of green, I'm rewalking the forest, rewalking the planet and its lines, looking left and right, up and down, like our ancestors, and each step, each resting spot, recalls an event at a different point in the timeline but tied to that same point in the planetline.
Now, as I struggle to make sense of 62 years of planetwalking and constantly have to customize CVs for various institutions and jobs with different interests and demands, I am grateful to have a new tool that makes the linear text CV feel like a stone tool, as blunt and useless as a handaxe.
It is called the STORYMAP.
I made my first years ago, using ArcGIS software, and did a presentation on it with my Nat Geo mentee, Lillygol Sedhagat at Nat Geo basecamp in DC. Now I've discovered a platform far better for me and my students (because it is open source and now features Google 3D Tiles and Blender/Unity integration).
It is called "Cesium Ion" Story maps.
And so here is my first GEOGRAPHICAL VITAE.
With it you too can explore my life -- and yours (yes, you can create your own and share it with everyone) -- and remember with great nostalgia "where you were... WHEN!"
Enjoy!
