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Milieu and mimicry
You know the way everyone’s starting to sound the same? It’s weird, right? Here at Mapped we’ve noticed a tonal shift, if not seismic, at least tremorous. The way we speak online tends to blur together...
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The sounds of cities
Much has been written about the sounds of cities (and we just wrote about it), but usually from sounds other than our voices. Cities have soundmarks, like landmarks. In San Francisco, it’s the sound of...
View ArticleHow words should be
Back in the days when my job mostly involved hacking through sizable tracts of web content undergrowth (which it still does, sometimes), I believed in something: that content on the web should be...
View ArticleA linguistic investigation
The number one song in America right now is ‘We are never ever getting back together’ by the pouty, prolific songstress, Taylor Swift (here’s a video with ransom-note like lyrics only). It’s a catchy...
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When data visualisation goes wrong
I love a good graph. If someone can turn those unsexy numbers into an easy-on-the-eyes series of rectangles, then, well, hooray. But let’s be honest about what data visualisation sometimes becomes: the...
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A dialectic on cute
“Why is my soup talking to me like it’s a person?” I heard a friend say this recently, to no one in particular, while glaring at the back of a tub of soup. This is what they saw: Since the dawn of...
View ArticleHilarity, linguistically deconstructed
This week, both members of Mapped were in London. The reason, besides friendship, was to see Louis CK’s standup in a ridiculously large arena show. I (Randall) am studying linguistics, for officialZ,...
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The shape of the tale: an experiment in storytelling
Outlines make a liar out of me. I used to hate them; now I just begrudge them. When I wrote fiction, the outline killed my plot; I would race from one section to another. It turned writing into a to do...
View ArticleThe story arc of sort-of triumph
While all stories have a structure that fits into certain categories, they all have unique shapes. My esteemed colleague wrote this in a post on this very site not long ago. I didn’t really question it...
View ArticleA year long Twitter story, a month in
In December, Elizabeth spotted a post from Jonathan Gibbs, a writer who wrote a story over a year via Twitter, and wanted to pass the account to someone new. Lucky for us, he chose Mapped. Starting...
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