ABSTRACT
Situated at the intersection of life writing studies, urban studies, geomedia and media studies, this chapter explores the practice of “personal story mapping.” Its recent upsurge is owed to the rise of social media and the spectacular advance of mapping technologies. According to its proponents, this democratized, narrative re-mapping of our spaces promises to be more participatory and dynamic than our previous mapping practices. This emergent “cartography of intimate narratives” indeed presents a positive alternative to the segregating dynamics of Cartesian geographic traditions, but only if we acknowledge these emerging technologies’ own conflicting epistemologies. This chapter traces the emergence of story mapping from the early 2000s to today, using two Amsterdam-based case studies: Amsterdam RealTime (2002) and the Amsterdam Diaries Time Machine (2024).
