The Booma Project

I love maps and I always have. I love them not just for their informational purpose or even for their beauty, but because I find them intensely revealing and meaningful. For me, looking at a map is like reading a person's private journal. Each and every map ever made reveals as much about its maker, about his or her point of view and sense of standing in the world, as it does about the world itself. For example, a map can be strictly local in outlook or global or universal, just as can an individual's way of thinking, like a map of someone's backyard versus a map of the world or a map of the Milky Way. A map can be evidence of human hope and adventurousness, such as a map of someone's travel itinerary, or of human hubris and greed, such as a map of a dictator's plans of conquest. Maps can be biased or prejudiced, drawn to favor one part of the world over another, as in many Western maps (even the ones in schoolbooks for many years) depicting Africa as significantly smaller than it really is, a representation of Western racism as much as a geographical lie. 

Even the rendering of a map says something about its maker, whether his or her choices were determined by time or artistic skill or purpose. A map can be vaguely drawn or highly detailed. It can be flat or round, textured and colored or plain black-and-white with shades of gray, strictly factual or wildly fantastical, mysterious, misleading, or mind-opening. A map can zero in on only one feature of a place--a map of the pubs of Dublin (a massive undertaking, no doubt), a map of all the gas stations in Peoria, a map of the stars' homes in Malibu, a map of literary landmarks in London (another daunting task).

I have an especial affection for the variety of maps that fit that last example--the literary map. Whenever you combine reading, books, travel, and maps, you got me. So a few months ago when I learned through the VIDA: Women in Literary Arts Facebook page that a new online project was looking for travel-loving writers who'd like to help map some books, I wanted to find out more and maybe even be a part of it. It was a bonus that the project's founder was especially interested in making sure works by women authors would be included and mapped.

The project is called Booma: The Bookmapping Project, and it's been up and running since June this year, with an inaugural "Daily Spot" entry that maps Robert Hass's San Francisco-set poem "The Harbor at Seattle." The mission of Booma is to map places in the real world that have been described so memorably by writers in their works. The project's interest is in reminding both lovers of books and travel how "the worlds of stories overlap with the real world," and it aims to "provide a platform for building and accessing the world's largest database of geographic information distilled from books." That sounds like quite a long, large, and ambitious project--but as most true bookworms tend to have long, ambitious lists of books they've read or plan to read, and most travel bugs are capable of thinking in long distances and making large, ambitious globe-encircling plans, the Booma project probably has the perfect kind of missionaries to accomplish its mission.

Booma's founder, David Herring, is a Tucson-based educator who explains the motivation behind Booma in his own comments on Booma's first Daily Spot entry. He writes:

"Robert Hass’s attention to location shaped my view of California long before I ever made my first trip to that storied state, and I specifically remember craning my neck to look for the steep side of Telegraph Hill as we drove through San Francisco years ago. More than with any other writer’s, Hass’s descriptions of place have unexpectedly bubbled into my consciousness during my travels and reminded me that I have known some places even before visiting them, which is at the heart of what Booma is."

So what kind of information does Booma provide for readers and travelers? Booma has so far mapped nearly 80 places and pieces of literature with its interactive Daily Spot feature. These spots each focus on a particular poem, novel, short story, play, or other piece of literature that notably describes a real world place. The named place may be the subject of the entire written work or may be just mentioned in one especially well-turned phrase or memorable chapter or paragraph. In any case, Booma's Daily Spot entries provide a relevant place-based quote from the work along with an interactive map pinpointing where in the world this place of song and story actually is. Booma users can also read a little bit in each entry about the written work (its overall plot, when it was published, or its initial reception by readers, for example) and the place in real life (such as how many people live there, what grows there, what famous events may have occurred there, and anything else that makes that place unique). For users who'd like to learn even more, links to where the written work may be purchased or read in its entirety as well as more info about the author and the place being described are provided. What's especially great is that in the 6 months since Booma has been live, places from all around the planet have been mapped (from Tucson to Tbilisi, from Nigeria to New York City) and writings from all throughout history have been featured (from Homer's The Iliad to Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter to Roxane Gay's An Untamed State and Cheryl Strayed's Wild). There are entries for lovers of Brit lit and lovers of Irish lit (yes, a chairde, there is a difference) and for lovers of poetry and lovers of non-fiction.

Along with the Daily Spots, Booma plans to be a digital resource for mapping longer pieces. Entire long poem and books will be annotated and mapped, such as Cormac McCarthy's southwestern American and Mexican-set novel All The Pretty Horses. Both fans of a book and teachers and students then can use Booma to enhance their study and research of a book or their understanding of and involvement in its story and setting. Herring himself has mapped entire books before, beginning with James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

As I mentioned above, when I first heard about this project, I thought I might like to contribute. So I contacted Herring back in July and have since contributed several Daily Spots, on works by John Millington Synge (Aran Islands, Ireland), Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, North Dakota), Toni Morrison (Michigan and the Midwest), Frank O'Hara (Manhattan), and Wendell Berry (Kentucky's Red River Gorge). I've really enjoyed writing these entries, as each one has given me the chance to learn more about some of my favorite writers and works and the places that served as their inspiration. I also enjoy reading all the other contributions, whether the subject is a piece of writing or a place I'm familiar with or not.

I also think Booma has the potential to be a valuable resource for teachers and students of creative writing as well as literature. Considering how much the importance of place has been a recurring theme in storytelling and literature--right up there with romantic love, death, and war--I think it's worthwhile to use maps and other information about places as a means to understand a text and the processes of writing and creativity. How does a real-world place serve as a door to creativity? How does the inspiration a writer gets after traveling through this town or looking at that mountain translate itself into words on a page? How do the sights and sounds of a place get successfully rendered in a story or poem, and what is the difference between a place that serves as a mere setting in a work and a place that almost comes to function as an emotion in the reader? Originality is another issue--there are lots of places in the world, but there have been far more people to write about them. In the case of "well-written" places (i.e., places that frequently get written about or chosen as a setting--say Paris or Chicago or the Mississippi River), how does one author navigate between the details of a place differently or more deftly than another? What role does an author's identity or sense of self or era play in how a place is portrayed or described? For example, Booma has a Daily Spot entry on Langston Hughes's poem about the Mississippi "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." How did Hughes, a black American writer of the 20th century, portray the Mississippi differently than Mark Twain, a white American writer of the 19th century who had a lifelong obsession with the river? And if these two men had been mapmakers rather than writers, how would their maps of the Mississippi compare? Whose map would I prefer to follow, if I had to choose one?

What I like about the idea of using maps as a resource for studying literature or for creativity is all the questions and possibilities. The concept of place may not be every writer's door leading into a poem or novel or essay, but it's one door that can lead a writer (and a reader) down multiple paths. (The poet Richard Hugo wrote, much more complexly and knowledgeably than I, about how the idea of a place can be used as a trigger for the imagination in his classic essay "The Triggering Town.") Moreover, in this age of talking GPS devices, text-speak, and 140-character limit thoughts, when there's been a lot of talk and fear about the decline of books and readership and the isolation and confusion that the Internet and technology can foster, any project that uses web technology to promote genuine interaction with literature and maps and encourage curiosity about the real, physical world and the creative poet types who've populated it is to be commended. Booma is a great project. I'm glad to have found out about it and proud to play a little part in it. Check it out at the website and Facebook page.