Andrew Otwell heard this great little item on NPR in the States last night, which is archived online for the rest of us. Called 50 Sound Stories and 466 Decibel Readings, it’s an audio-based ‘knowledge map’ of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Rachel Thompson, the creator/curator says:
"Perhaps what we were trying to do with the project is suggest a different point of entry for visitors to the city, or a different way for residents of the cities to reconsider how they navigate or how they experience their city on a daily basis"
Bit like the work of Tony Schwartz, bit like NY Songlines …
Part of a collection of ‘knowledge maps’ at the Twin Cities Design Festival (other maps apparently include one called Odorama, which plots the olfactory experiences of Minneapolis and St. Paul – I can’t link to that because Macromedia haven’t built plugins for that kind of thing yet, I guess). There are some other good maps, including one based around Scott Paterson’s PDPal, which I saw him demo at Doors.
More on the maps here, though as Andy says, there’s more about the audio map in the NPR item here.
The sound and smell maps are cute, but would be more interesting and useful if the data were published so it could be mapped against other demographic and infrastructure data like household income, race, education, density, zoning, access to transit, etc.