Leni Hirsch

Leni Hirsch

went into the exercise quite confident. After all, I don’t use a GPS to get to any destination between the Quad, athletic fields, HLS and the Square. In fact, I know many shortcuts and feel I give decent directions to the many tourists who ask for them. In the end though, I struggled so much I could not truly “complete” my map. I had a great deal of information still in my head that I could not represent spatially. I recognized this was the case when I started to draw Oxford and Kirkland Streets (two streets I rely on to get back to my dorm) and realized that my original placement and angle of the Quad, Yard and Law school were so wrong that drawing the streets between them in a sensible way was not possible. I’ve come to know these streets on foot and by bike by following other people and often times by trial and error. Therefore, I can easily tell you how to get from place to place, but I had never studied a map closely enough to know where one thing is in relation to another. I also learned that I have a very linear perspective of the streets; I know intersections, but not much else. Unless a street is significantly curved, I think of it as straight and therefore, in my sketch, I attempted to make the streets into a grid that does not actually exist. Despite the shortcomings of my map, I was able to depict the direction cars move on each street and if they have bike lanes. This finding makes sense given my life depends on this knowledge on a daily basis. I could also list many of the stores/sites on each street (far more than 10, but I went that far to demonstrate my relative confidence in locating popular shops). Again, in hindsight, this finding makes sense since I’ve learned this area from getting from some Point A to some Point B successfully, without really looking how they are laid out spatially.