Lab 2a: Fun with Google Maps

View The Best Places To Visit In Nantes, France in a larger map

Before completing the Lab 2a assignment, I had never even thought of making my own Google Map. For a long time, I had been taking Google Maps for granted and never took a second to think about the work that people went through when using neogeography. I have to admit that making my own Google Map was not an easy task, considering the fact I am not anywhere close to being a computer genius. It was only after coming up with an idea and purpose that could potentially convey my own experiences and understanding through knowledge of place (that other people would be inclined to take a look at) that I started to feel the first hint of excitement. It was at that moment that I realized how much potential the idea of identifying and describing the best places to visit in Nantes, France had and how much other people could benefit from it. After spending nine months in France last year, I understood the frustration of getting to a place and not getting enough help from local people when it came to sightseeing. I realized that local people tend to take places where they have lived their whole lives too much for granted; many had never even visited the museums. It was then, up to me to take matters into my own hands and to see for myself. I created my Google Map by combining all of the places that I loved the most during my time there and that I would willingly go visit again. Looking over my completed Google Map was very rewarding in that I knew that I had fulfilled everything that Neogeography was all about: sharing location information with friends and visitors, helping shape context,
and conveying understanding through knowledge of place.
The completion of this project was not just rewarding for me, but potentially rewarding for others who have found themselves in the same situation. Overall, it had more positive consequences than negative ones.

It was only through hard work and toil that I was able to make it to this rewarding end. Most pitfalls concerned javascript coding. Doing the right coding for images and links was difficult enough for me. The most frustrating thing was placing a code into my google maps and getting something like “<” as an ending product. It took a long time for me to realize that there were slight errors when I was copying and pasting codes into codes that would not allow the image or link to appear. One very memorable and stressful incident was that after embedding a manifold of images and links into my Jules Vernes Museum information window, a few hours later, they were all gone; despite the fact that I had seen them in my final product after saving and closing the editing mode a few hours ago. I could not understand why this happened, so I made sure that while working on Google Maps, I would save constantly to ensure that it would not happen again. This showed me how unpredictable and unreliable technology could be especially when it comes to coding. One other thing that I had to fight with and surrendered to was embedding youtube videos into the information windows. After following all of the instructions carefully, under the “editing” screen, it showed that the video had been successfully embedded. It was when I clicked on “Save” and “Done” and viewed it, that the video disappeared. Thinking that it was a problem since I already had an image in the information window, I took off the image and tried again to no avail. I tried several times using other youtube videos but none of them showed up in my ending product. That was when I decided that it was best to stick to meaningful links and images that could help replace the benefits of attaching a video. Out of all of the positive consequences of neogeography, one negative one was found in that after hours of working on my Google Map, I knew that those who would view it, would not think that so much time was put into it at all.