Alma Lafler

Alma Lafler

My map is accurate enough that it could help a tourist get around the included parts of town with little trouble. I commute around campus by bicycle and am very familiar with the road network around Harvard, which would likely make it different from a map drawn by someone who, for example, takes the bus and doesn’t need to pay attention to the roads between their origin and their destination. On top of this, I grew up in Cambridge, and was able to bring other personal landmarks to mind when I was thinking about the shape of the campus.

I found that it was easiest to produce a more accurate representation of areas I couldn’t initially remember by envisioning myself on the street in a familiar area, and then imagining myself moving to the misremembered area. The shape and elements in the map are noticeably more accurate in the places I spend a lot of time or travel through every day than in the areas I only go occasionally. Interestingly, there are some buildings that extend back much farther from the street than I drew, which I didn’t realize because I have not been in them, and have only seen them from the street.

I drew my map such that you could draw grid-like lines going North-South and East-West along the major roads, but in reality, Cambridge appears “tilted” to the northeast – something I knew but didn’t feel comfortable enough to accurately incorporate. I hadn’t thought this about much before, but the city seems to be aligned with the orientation of the river rather than the cardinal directions, which suggests to me that perhaps Cambridge was originally settled along the Charles, with homes slowly radiating out from that boundary.