Personal Maps

There are a lot of personal maps out there on the web devoted to where people have been, what people have done, where family lived in the past...  if you can map it and it's about you, that's a personal map.

Some of the most prolific personal maps are non-electronic and found on the backs of motor homes and RVs.These are typically maps of the United States and/or Canada and consist of a set of state or province-shaped stickers. 

The rules go like this: if you visit, drive through, or camp in a state, you get to put the decal on.  There is quite a debate among RV enthusiasts about whether you actually have to camp there (in your RV) to get the sticker or if you just have to drive through it. The debate is, from what I hear, a bit of a big deal.

The high-tech version of the RV decal collection was made popular by Facebook.

A "Where I've Been" app map.  Red = "lived there." Blue = "been there."

Facebook was one of the first to make personal maps both easily accessible and popular with the online "Where I've Been" app. Their initial app allowed you to create a map by checking a list of the states, provinces, and/or countries you've been to or lived in.

You can go crazy will the virtual pushpins with this version of "Where I've Been."

Later iterations allowed you to go into further detail about the cities you've been to, the places you've actually lived in, and the places you've merely wanted to visit.

Flightmemory.com is one of my favorites.  It's especially nice for people who fly quite a bit, since it won't stay static for years at a time.  It not only allows you to keep track of where you've been, but also what flight you were on, when it took off and landed, your satisfaction with the airline, if you flew for business or for personal reasons, which class you flew in, and whether you had a window, aisle, or center seat. The information you choose to enter is up to you.

The site logs all of the geographic information and creates a handy map.

There are single-country maps if you've flown domestically, and a world map if you've flown internationally. If you have intra-European flights, those are also given on a separate, zoomable map. 

You can also enter your flight ahead of when you book it.  Flightmemory keeps a real-time map of the users who are in the air at the time you check it.

Flightmemory users in the air at 0330GMT on 5-12-2011.

In addition, depending on how much information you choose to enter, you'll get information on your Top Ten Airports, Top Ten Airlines, Top Ten Routes, and Top Ten Aircraft.  I found out through this process that my personally most popular airport to fly through away from home is not Detroit, like I thought, but Milwaukee's Mitchell Field.

You can go a step further and create all sorts of fun, detailed work on your own if you have access to a full-fledged GIS program.  The people over at radicalcartography.net -- who rate high enough for me to write an entire column someday devoted solely to some of the incredible mapmaking they do -- have created personal maps that show the highways they been on across the United States and Canada. 

The interesting thing about radicalcartography's personal highway maps is that they have consciously chosen to not put any markers on the maps -- nothing except for the highways themselves: no highway labels, no state boundaries, no oceans, no rivers or lakes -- just the highways.  It makes for an interesting perspective, especially if a person, say, flies into a city and never leaves the metropolitan area.  


Mark's North America, mid-2010.
Can you tell the destinations?  Was one the Pacific Ocean?


My version of this map was drawn with ArcGIS. It uses only state, provincial, and national highways, except for in instances where a county road was needed to make a particularly long road trip look like we didn't hop in a helicopter for 20 miles. It, like most of my personal maps, is a work in progress.