The New Media Writer as Cartographer

With the advent of GPS-enabled mobile writing devices such as smart phones and tablets, writing has become invested with a new power to express place—both through the geo-coding of one's writing location and through the presentation of place-based research on customized digital maps. This essay argues that teachers of writing must learn to accommodate and exploit these new and developing digital modalities while also making students aware of the theoretical and lived implications of digital cartographies. The essay first reviews several digital mapping projects that force their users to reconsider standard notions of place and indexicality. The essay then outlines a curriculum for teaching digital mapping in a composition-rhetoric course and presents successful examples of student work.