After examining examples from the mapping readings, many thought flies by my mind about creating a map that represent my identity. After carefully considered all my thoughts, I decided to create a map that tells my life as a twenty one year old immigrant college student. I decide to make this map using Photoshop. I prefer to make a digital version instead of a physical version because technology is also a very important part that represents me.
I choose three different locations that represent my life in a simple and clean way. It is like a time progression map that indicates where I am as in that specific time frame. The three locations are Kaiping, Chicago, and Urbana-Champaign. Kaiping is the place of my birth, where I spent the most amount of my life time living there. It is a small city located at the southern side of China. I attended kindergarten and great school in Kaiping. Before a week I turn thirteen, I moved to Chicago with my family. I spent my high school life in Chicago. After graduating from high school, I moved to Urbana-Champaign because I became a student in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
The three locations I picked are really important for building my personality. I had a hard time allocating my thoughts because I do not know how to fit all three different locations together. However, after seeing the example from Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin, I was inspired by their idea that only showing what they want to show (Harmon 13). Therefore I take only a fragment of the whole map to represent the location. For Kaiping, I used a map that indicates the whole city but erase all the boundaries and other details to indicate a feeling of blankness. Even though I lived in Kaiping for the most amount of my life time and had good childhood memory there, it is now becoming blurry and not as familiar as it used to be. The next map is Chicago. I also used the map for the whole Chicago area. The difference is that this time I leave the boundaries to indicate more details of the map. I did that because it is the city where I starting to get to know more about myself. The last map is the campus map, which is a fragment of Urbana-Champaign city. I decide to narrow down to only this part and show almost all the details of the city because I finally narrow down what I want to do for life after I fully explored myself in college.
Originally, I thought of using picture to indicate the rest of my thought but I change my mind because it hurts the cleanliness of this map. Therefore I decided to use text only. Above the maps, I indicated the number of years I lived in that city. I round the number up to the third decimal place to convey people that the moments that I move from city to city are very important and remarkable. Therefore need to record in very detail. Right under the map, I put many different important moments in life to indicate what I have done in that particular city. By showing context between different things that happened in my life, I varied the text by fonts using what I called the “OMG moment” scale. The most “OMG moment” will be indicated in the largest font and smallest font indicated only the “Oh moment”. In fact, everything indicated in the map are all equally important to me, the variation was made only according to my personal feeling toward that specific event or matter. The red spot in the maps were meant to indicate the location where I resided. The color choice of the map can also represent a little about my identity. I value art and design and therefore I used this color scheme because I want it to attract eyeballs. I left the maps black and white to emphasize the feeling of cutting edge and cleanliness.
After all, this map is created based on the combination of convention, creative, and psychographic. I wish to let people know more about my identity as I grow up with multi-cultural backgrounds. There is not such single place that represents me. I am a young individual who shaped by all these important events and matters that happened in my life in these three cities.
Reference
Harmon, Katharine. “Introduction”. The Map as Art. Princeton Architectural Press. Electronic article.
jiajiepan 
Your map was one of my favorites out of the entire class. I thought it was very clever how you used less fill in lines for the beginning and increased them in each of the maps. I also really enjoyed your OMG moments and the use of the increase in font size to show that. I liked how you used the exact amount of years in each place down to three decimal places. Your map was very simple but had so much meaning and personal information. It really gave a good window into your life.
Your map was very original and very creative. One of the most unique maps I saw during the presentations. It was not only personal, it also contained so many different elements that made it all the more interesting. The increasing experiences varying from place to place as well as the OMG moments, where the font increased pertaining to importance to you. It was very easy to tell that you worked very hard on this project and that you put a lot of thought into it. There were so many areas of your map that were 100% original. I enjoyed your presentation and love this idea. Great job!
-Emily
The first thing I noticed was how blank the first map was compared to the other two. After I read the categories under each map, i understood why the first map had less content and detail than the others. Similar to my map, your childhood is mainly focused around family. Then, as you grow up and experience more things, your life becomes crowded with new activities, hobbies, and feelings. I like how you were able to demonstrate emotions without using pictures or images. I thought the scale for the different fonts was clever. I like how the labels are “OMG” and “Oh”. At first I thought it was just funny, but I realized it makes it easier for us to relate because “OMG” has become a part our daily language now.