Seeing With New Eyes

The Borderlands Project is one way of looking at the world around us through different eyes. The idea is that by actually traversing the borders themselves we'll have viewpoints that are different from just imagining the borders. The project also encourages the gathering of data of all kinds, waypoints and routes, reporting on issues connected to the borderlands, stories about the people who live there, the animals, plants, even the rocks and soil. As the project progresses all of this data together will produce a map, what author William least Heat-Moon called deep mapping. It is possible to visualize this in many ways: with words, drawings, photographs, even sculpture, and plays, academic research.

I just ran across one of the most amazing examples of the power of seeing things differently at a website called Visual Complexity . There are some 600 "maps" there that use data in a very graphic approach. Click through the different examples and I think you'll see what I mean.