Japan in known for having a difficult-to-parse street-addressing system and Tokyo is equally known for having a labyrinthian metro system, both of which make travel for tourists more challenging. Fortunately, in our case, both of these were mitigated significantly by using Google Maps on our rented Android phone to find our way.  Google Maps has excellent coverage in Japan (in contrast to both Apple’s and Nokia’s maps offerings, which pale by comparison), and Google has particularly good transit routing; I can’t imagine how we would have navigated Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka without it.

For example, here’s how a routing from our Tokyo hotel, The B Akasaka, to Omotesando Koffee a couple of metro away, stops looks like:

Google Maps recognized both places as I was typing their names, and gave me the next metro times from the nearest station, along with the cost (160 Yen); selecting any one of these I get step-by-step directions, including the platform number, train direction and number of stops:

And touching any of the steps along the way shows even more detail:

From that map I can clearly see that I want to take exit A2 out of Omotesando station (a very useful piece of information as that metro station along has myriad exits spanning many different city blocks).

While I truly can’t imagine how we would have efficiently navigated Tokyo without Google Maps, I equally realize that outsourcing our wayfinding to Google came at a price.  Here, for example, is a Google Latitude trace of our travels around the Akasaka neighbourhood on the right and the Omotesando neighbourhood on the left. We took the metro back and forth myriad times for different purposes, ended up walking, through the Roppongi district, from one to the other once, and spent a lot of time in and around each neighbourhood:

It is only now, however, looking at these traces, that I have any real sense of how these neighbourhoods sit relative to each other geographically. I realize only now that places in Omotesando that I thought of as being miles apart were actually on adjacent blocks. I realize only now that there was a huge cemetery  between the two neighbourhoods that we skirted once as we walked, but otherwise weren’t mindful of.

It’s this kind of context that I would have been forced to gain in a pre-Google Maps travel world, where a good printed map of the area and a more detailed manual parsing of the metro network would have been the only tools at hand.

Don’t get me wrong: I treasured the efficiency that Google Maps’ routings afforded us. But in its efficient point-to-point routing what we lost was a greater sense of place. We were, in a sense, being routed by Google as packets in a network, emerging from the metro at various points in the network that is Tokyo to engage in some activity or another, only to go back underground to emerge somewhere else, completely unmindful of how point A and point B might relate to each other culturally or geographically.

Amidst a discussion on this notion, Sami Niemelä tweeted earlier today “I love navigating new cities with no GPS or even maps. Getting lost gracefully is a form of art” and pointed to the description of a McGill University study, “Study suggests reliance on GPS may reduce hippocampus function as we age” that says, in part:

There are two major ways of navigating: by spatial navigation or by stimulus-response methods. The spatial method uses landmarks and visual cues to develop cognitive maps that enable us to know where we are and how to get where we want to go. The second method relies on repeatedly traveling by the most efficient route, as though on auto-pilot. The second method will be familiar to those using GPS.

In Japan we were clearly in the “as though on auto-pilot” camp, and, beyond any long-term effect on our hippocampi, I truly do believe we lost something in the process, whether it be “getting lost gracefully” or simply understanding the lay of the land more intimately.

Ironically one of our favourite discoveries in Osaka happened due to a Google Maps accident. We were trying to find Truck Furniture and relied upon an “unverified” Google Maps listing to get us there:

This turned out, in fact, not to be the location of Truck Furniture at all (it was 90 minutes walk away to the north). But what we did find, on the next corner, was the excellent Cafe Noto, a “third wave” coffee shop, where I had an excellent espresso and Oliver an excellent crème brûlée. It was a discovery we never would have made without “getting lost,” and a highlight of our visit to the city.

The McGill researchers suggest a hybrid approach to navigation might be in our longterm best interest:

Bohbot suggested it may be wise to restrict GPS use to an aid in finding the way to a new destination, but to turn it off on the way back or when going somewhere that is not new. Building cognitive maps takes time and effort, but with the hippocampus, it may be a case of “use it or lose it,” and Bohbot said she does have fears that reducing the use of spatial navigation strategies may lead to earlier onset of Alzheimer’s or dementia.

I don’t know about dementia, but I do know there’s value, and joy, in understanding geography, making mental models of places, and in getting lost. So perhaps on our next trip to Japan we’ll do some more aimless wandering in addition to our precision-targeted packet routing.

While we were in Japan over the last two weeks I was using a rented HTC Evo from Global Advanced Communications. While the customer service from the company was excellent — the phone was waiting at the desk of my hotel when we arrived, as promised, and was all ready to go — the phone itself was a klunky older model, very bug-prone (apps, especially Google Maps, crashed regularly; keyboard input was difficult) and the promised “max 40 Mbps” of throughput via WiMAX never amounted to much more than 1 Mbps. And the battery was incapable of supporting a full day’s worth of use (fortunately a spare battery was included, which I needed to use from about 4:00 p.m. onward every day). 

But it did the job, had a good camera (see the results in Flickr), and, being an Android phone, was dead-simple to connect to my existing Google ecosystem.  Including Google Latitude. Which means that we have a very nice set of digital breadcrumbs of our trip. Here’s our footprint in Japan over 13 days:

Here’s our footprint in Tokyo, where we were from March 14 to 20 and then again from March 25 to 27:

And here’s Kyoto and Osaka, where we were from March 20 to 25:

It’s all frightfully accurate, and thus useful for tracking down “when exacting did we eat lunch at Bird?” or “where was that little gallery we visited?” Here’s that lunch at Bird, for example, on Monday morning before we left Osaka (it’s in PEI time; Osaka time was 12 hours ahead, so it was just before 2:00 p.m. on Monday):

One of the projects I plan to carry out during my Hacker in Residence project at UPEI is a mechanism for slurping in geopresence for a variety of sources into a “personal geopresence archive.” Google Latitude, along with Foursquare, Twitter, Plazes, and other sources will be the target data sources, and this Japanese trip gives me a nice place to start.

Blame Ian for this. Certainly easier than tapping it all out on the glass keyboard of the iPad. Click to see it bigger.

Breaking radio silence briefly to point you to our ever-expanding collection of photos from Japan. We are in Kyoto as I type, after 6 great days in sunny, warm Tokyo.

Oliver and I are off to Japan in the morning. We take the 6:00 a.m. flight from Charlottetown to Toronto, then fly from Toronto to Washington Dulles, and finally head for Tokyo on United 803, arriving 4:35 p.m. local time on Thursday. Japan, conveniently, is currently 12 hours ahead of Charlottetown (a nice counterpart to the “1 yen is about a penny Canadian”), so we’ll be landing 2:30 a.m. on Thursday morning Charlottetown time.

But they tell me it’s best to not think of these things, and to get yourself into the headspace of the destination. So I’m thinking hard about it being 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday as I type (despite what the clocks tell me, and it being dark outside, and me being ready to go to bed). Talk to you from the other side of the world.

It might appear to careful readers that I have given up the ghost on this hacker-in-residence blog. But I haven’t. I’ve been away on other business for the first part of March and now I’m off to Japan with my son for a vacation for the rest of the month. Regular hacking will resume in April.

In the meantime, perhaps you’d like to register for a pre-conference workshop I’m presenting on May 14th for the Atlantic Provinces Library Association annual conference called “DIY Mapping for Libraries.”

Catherine spoke to CBC’s Karen Mair about her show in the Confederation Centre Art Gallery; listen:

(Embedded audio widget courtesy of A Better Embedder, which is really quite wonderful).

Last night the City of Charlottetown held a public meeting about the proposed National Folk Festival in Victoria Park. The meeting was required under the Victoria Park and Promenade Bylaw:

Where the Parks and Recreation Manager, in consultation with the Parks & Recreation and Culture Committee, determines that a proposed special event is a major event, then the application for use shall be referred to Council who will by resolution approve (with or without conditions) or reject the application. Council will, before reaching a decision, hold a public meeting to receive public input as to whether or not, and if so, on what conditions the proposed major event ought to proceed.

The bylaw currently in place, last amended in 2009, is the successor of the original bylaw, passed in June of 1873, a bylaw that stated, in part:

The said lands shall be used, appropriated and set apart by the said City, at the expense of the said City, for the sole purpose of a Park, Promenade and Pleasure Ground, for the use of the citizens, the inhabitants of this Island, and all Her Majesty’s subjects.

The said City shall not, on any account whatsoever, use, or permit to be used, the said lands, for the purposes of Circuses, Shows, or Exhibitions of any kind, whatsoever, and should the same be so permitted to be used by the said City, the lands hereinbefore mentioned shall revert to and be vested in Her Majesty, her heirs and successors.

At last night’s meeting I stood up to oppose the granting of permission to use Victoria Park for a folk festival because I believe that public spaces should be free and open to the public; I believe this same spirit was reflected in the original bylaw: “for the use of the citizens, the inhabitants of this Island, and all Her Majesty’s subjects.”

There has been a disturbing trend in recent year in Charlottetown to wall off public spaces – Confederation Landing Park, Victoria Row, sections of Queen Street, and Victoria Park – for the exclusive use of ticket-buyers. The justification for these walls is most often some combination “it’s only for a weekend” or “it will bring huge tourism dollars to the city”; these rationalizations ignore the fundamental rights of all the citizens of the city, rich and poor, to benefit from public spaces.

When we put up walls in Victoria Park and say to our citizens “you can only go in this space – this space you and your ancestors have paid for and stewarded – unless you can come up with $100 for a weekend pass” we are disenfranchising many of our fellow citizens for whom such expense is simply not managable.

I’m a big supporter of the folk festivals and of folk music in general; I think the team behind the proposed National Folk Festival is top flight, and their proposal is well-considered. But I cannot conscience supporting an event that excludes some of my friends and neighbours on economic grounds. I think our ancestors understood this, and I think it’s time we did the responsible thing and update the bylaw to clearly state that public spaces are for the public, for all the public.

At the PEI Home and School Federation’s 60th Anniversary Concert this Saturday night, March 2, 2013, there will a silent auction of artworks from invited guests. These original works have all been created from a single sheet of bristol board and crayons, and are on the general topic of “memories of public school.” Here’s the contribution from Catherine:

If you’re a longtime reader you may recall part of this image from a photo I took on Oliver’s first day of school:

Catherine took Oliver, and added me. My own galpumphy presence notwithstanding, it’s a beautiful piece, crafted from Japanese paper ripped and glued to the bristol board (Catherine’s never been one for following the rules).

Limited tickets are still available for the event; call the Confederation Centre Box Office to reserve yours soon!

App.net has opened a “free tier” of membership, with invitations available from paid members. Because this makes it less an enclave, I’m diving back in (I was an early supporter, but lost interest when the plains were too barren). Find me at alpha.app.net/ruk.