PRACTICE
What could it mean to think with place? To feel the city? How might the tactics of practical knowledge be employed to interfere with epistemological hegemonies from within? I explore and respond to these questions through deep mapping. The concept of 'deep maps' and 'deep mapping' was first conceived by Pearson and Shanks in 1994 through a multimedia performed lecture (2001, 162). For Pearson and Shanks (2001), the deep map attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the factual and the fictional, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place. (65) Les Roberts (2018a) notes that everything you might want to say may be voluminous, polyvocal or open-ended. Unlike the surface dimensions that delineate and give shape to the locational properties of place, verticality and depth denote a comparative absence of limitations. The deeper you go, the more layers you accrue. The problem becomes how to hold it all together: how to ‘frame’ it as a map. (49) My interest is not in deep maps as objects of knowledge but rather in deep mapping as a research practice. Deep mapping resists preemptive definition for it is through practicing deep mapping that deep mapping becomes articulated as an apparatus of investigation. This page is therefore an invitation to think through practice in order to arrive at a situated theory of deep mapping. Whereas my discussion of disorientation disoriented the conventions of introductions by navigating through vignettes of moments, my discussion of practice assumes the dialogic form of deep mapping. Writes Robert Darnton (2000): Time was when readers kept commonplace books...Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality. Tim Cresswell describes commonplacing as the creation of a "literary topos" whereby one "record[s] the wisdom of others, and gradually draw[s] upon it to form a unique new assemblage...." (2019, 10). What follows is a digital commonplace: embedded on the left are multi-media passages from the physical-conceptual fields of my encounter; on the right, interpretations of deep mapping generated through navigations within and as part of them. Similar to how Clifford McLucas wrote ten things about deep maps (2000), I share some understandings about deep mapping I have come to recognize through the course of practice. The way this page is structured, the digital commonplace is itself one half of an open-ended dialogue. You are invited to create a digital commonplace of your own as you read by taking notes and making notes in the "asides" panel on the right.

Note This is admittedly a busy page with a lot of visual material. Click here ▼ to skip the digital commonplace and arive directly at my theory of deep mapping and a figure of practice.