Where has my stuff been? Mapping consumption with beginning Cultural Anthro students

Being an anthropologist who works primarily in digital, urban, and North American and European contexts, one thing I like to emphasize in my classes is that one doesn't necessarily have to go to the other side of the world to do anthropology - culture can be found anywhere there are people. I also like doing interactive activities; it's great seeing students learn through their own experience! In my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class, during the week we go over world-systems theory, I like to illustrate this by starting with some of our most familiar objects - the clothes, school supplies, and electronics we have with us on a daily basis. When I've done this activity in the past, I've just had students look up the relevant information online and present it to the class. This time - partly due to the fact that I have become somewhat obsessed with mapping over the course of my fieldwork and data analysis, and partly inspired by the amazing Digital Humanities SoCal meeting I attended a few weeks ago - I decided to make it a little more interactive and a little more visual. I projected the map with a few examples on the screen, and the students were given the following instructions: 1. Find an object you have with you. 2. Answer the following (using the Internet on your laptop or smartphone, or one of your classmates', for parts 1 and 2) to find out the following: - Where was it made? - Where was it designed, or where is the company headquarters? - Where did you buy it? 3. Put these on the map, using a red marker for the first, a yellow marker for the second, and a blue marker for the third. Here's what we came up with (for interactive version, see the link above):

It helped spark an interesting discussion - through a very relatable medium - about where our things come from, the places we are indirectly related to through our things, and the relations among core, periphery, and semi-periphery. Has anyone done anything similar? Has it worked/not worked? Let me know!

Mapping Pre-fieldwork

Since returning from Poland and trying to figure out exactly what all this information I've collected (pictures, brochures, notes, etc.) means and what to do with it - in particular, how to turn it into a project with clear-cut questions and goals - one thing I've been really struck by is the role of place (and materiality more broadly) to memory, and the complex relationship of these to digital media. Media and globalization allow people to more easily and quickly communicate with other people, and learn about places, events, and cultural phenomena, around the world. On one hand, this contributes to a sense of "placelessness" and mobility - the idea that individuals can physically move around and yet remain connected to familiar people, information, and social networks, or the idea that, as with Second Life, one can actually create and build contexts for interaction, apart from existing physical-world contexts. (Coming of Age in Second Life is a good recent ethnography that deals with this topic fairly extensively.)
On the other, technology is also being used as another means of associating meaning with physical-world locations and objects. (I'm very aware of this every time I attempt to find my way around San Diego, which is quite difficult without the use of my GPS.) This is, of course, continuous with much older technologies - e.g., maps, walking routes - but digital media allows for more interactive content, such as associating text, photos, videos, etc. with locations on maps, or even in the physical world - such as with QR Codes. I'd seen these around, but hadn't really paid attention or known what they were until I saw them attached to some of the historical sites in Łódź.
With regard to some of my own data, I've been playing around with ZeeMaps, which is a Web site that lets you add your own info tags and media content to Google maps. Organizing photos and information by place - e.g., tagging particular cafes, street corners, etc. - rather than by name, description, or album, like I would if I were labeling them on, for instance, Facebook, has proved an interesting sort of experiment in thinking about how memory is organized via digital media. Here's an as-yet-unfinished map of some of the places I visited during my trip this summer, some with photos and brief descriptions.