num_pages: 112
description: With artful wit and rigor the cartographer Denis Wood has written numerous books (including the influential bestseller The Power of Maps ) that reorient his readers not only to our neighborhoods homes and bodies but also to our own very human instinct to understand where we live by mapmaking. At the heart of Wood's investigations is a near-legendary the Boylan Heights maps begun in 1982 and now published in Everything Sings . Surveying his century-old half-square mile neighborhood Boylan Heights in Raleigh North Carolina Wood began by paring away the inessential map crap (scale orientation street grids) and in searching for the revelatory in the unmapped and the unmappable he ended up plotting such phenomena as radio waves permeating the air the light cast by street lights and Halloween pumpkins on porches. As radio host Ira Glass writes in his introduction to this volume we see which homes have wind chimes and which ones call the cops. We see the route of the letter carrier and the life cycle of the daily paper. Wood is writing a novel where we never meet the main characters but their stuff is everywhere. Together Wood's maps accumulate into a multi-layered story about one neighborhood that tells the larger story of what constitutes the places we call home.Denis Wood (born 1945) is a geographer an independent scholar and the author of several books on maps including the popular and highly influential The Power of Maps (which originated as an exhibition Wood curated for the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design). His most recent publications include The Natures of Maps (co-authored with John Fels) and Rethinking the Power of Maps (with Fels and John Krygier). Selected maps from Everything Sings have been exhibited internationally such as at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College as well as included in a variety of publications including Katherine Harmon's You Are Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination.
language: English
title: Denis Wood: Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas
publisher: Siglio