Yellow Arrows and Processing Places

September 5, 2007

For the second day in a row I spent a lot of time taking notes and learning about various online projects and possibilities. Today's NITLE session was on wireless and mobile technology, and once again it was led by Bryan Alexander (blog here). What caught my ear was a reference to various ongoing efforts to create an annotated geography of various cities. One effort in this direction is Yellow Arrow.

The idea of Yellow Arrow is that someone will set a Yellow Arrow sticker on a building or sign.. and then post online a note about what is unique or interesting about that spot. Anyone who comes across the sticker can send in its code from a cell phone and receive via instant message the note about that particular place. If enough of these yellow arrows were to get placed, there would be a virtual democratic geography of a city.

The goal of these yellow arrows is not to mark history's great events (the brass plaques do that just fine).. but to mark the everyday places that acquire individual significance. This idea works best in a large city like New York with lots of people willing to step into the role of geographer of personal space. For a nicely done introduction to the goals of this group press here. It is hard not to be swept up by the vision of humble spots all across the city that are important to someone.. if only because this is where someone catches a bus every morning.

This project ties in perfectly with my book project (How to Build Places with Words: The Narrative Construction of Sacred Places). My argument is that place gains significance as people attach stories to physical sites. Some of these stories (death of Jesus, place where someone proposed to his wife, or site of national tragedy) acquire immense significance for group or personal identities. The Yellow Arrow project is an example of this phenomenon at work.. only it takes place almost entirely on the level of personal identity. I doubt anyone is marking 9/11's ground zero with a yellow sticker.. the goal here is more modest.

The temptation in studying something like Yellow Arrow is to think of it as a unique outgrowth of our digital age. But this work of connecting places to stories is something that takes place in every culture. What underlies this response to place is our human cognitive reliance on narrative to build meaning and identity. A project like Yellow Arrow makes that process visible in a new and unique way.. but it is a human response to place that is as old as the earliest human records (see someday my chapter on Abydos in ancient Egypt).

Also, I think it is important to recognize the limitations of a project like this. If it worked perfectly and a large body of individuals covered a city with yellow arrows and personal commentary about sites.. what would be accomplished? It would be a version of a city that captured a cross-section of its lived experience in our own time. What I am after as a scholar of the city is to imagine the way the city was experienced 100, 200 or even 1,000 years ago. If Yellow Arrow had been around back then, what would the text messages say? What zones of human misery or triumph would we discover? The work of the scholar is thus essentially a creative work..

Yellow Arrow, it should also be noted, does not allow for any differentiation in historic layers or class/ethnic differences in perception. The result is a "melting pot" model of human geography in which everyone is part of a human present. That may be or preferred version of the world.. but it muddles the fractured human geography that scholars must pursue.