The atlas contains "place-inspired maps, including maps of night, crime, fences, graffiti, textures, autumn leaves, routes, the underground, lines overhead, stars, and jack-o-lanterns".
Lines overhead map
Jack-o-lantern Map
Underground Map
Dennis Wood described the origin of this Atlas: "I thought I might help my students learn something about how to read the landscape by focusing hard on a small piece of it". This way of looking at the aspects of the place that usually pass unnoticed reminds me a lot of Georges Perec Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu Parisien: "Mon propos [...] a été de décrire le reste : ce que l'on ne note généralement pas, ce qui ne se remarque pas, ce qui n'a pas d'importance : ce qui se passe quand il ne se passe rien." (My aim was to describe all the rest: the things that we usually don't write down, what's not noticeable, what's unimportant, what's happening when nothing is happening.)
Georges Perec, Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu Parisien, 1975 (Forgive the bad translation)
He also described this approach in a previous text:
«How to speak of these ‘common things’, or rather how to track them, how to drive them out, tear them from the gangue in which they were glued, how to give them a meaning, a language: let them finally speak of what there is, of what we are.
Maybe it’s a matter of creating our own anthropology: one that would talk of us, one that would look for what we for so long pillage from others. Not anymore the exotic, but the endotic.
Interrogate what seems so natural that we forgot its origin. To find again some surprise.»
Georges Perec, L'Infra-ordinaire, 1973
The Dennis Wood Atlas seems to be a balance between Perec's literary approach and a scientist's one.
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