Rachel Stromberg

Rachel Stromberg

My experience of mapping Harvard Square from memory was a frustrating one. It is one thing to know where two buildings are in relation to one another; it is quite another to know where those two buildings are in relation to a network of streets, landmarks, and thirty-odd other buildings. However, my map ended up being reasonably accurate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I mapped the area of the Square that is my “home turf” (namely, Quincy House and its surroundings) most accurately, and my map gets less specific and less accurate radiating outward from there.

While sketching, I chose to differentiate between the places I knew for certain and those whose locations I was less sure of by drawing the former as angular shapes and the latter as formless blobs. I initially just hoped this would be symbolic of my uncertainty surrounding certain sites, but I realized that it is actually deeply reflective of the way I think about space, and the mental navigation system I use in real life. For instance, I do not know exactly where Dunster House is, nor even quite what it looks like, but I know that if I keep walking east along the river for a while, I will run into it fairly soon. Similarly, in my head, Northwest Labs are somewhere nebulously north and east of Annenberg and the Science Center. This level of specificity in my knowledge of location, although low, is perfectly sufficient to allow me to navigate the Square. The map in my head contains more blobs than rectangles, but it gets the job done.