In one of my seminar classes last week, a peer made a passing critique of cartographic methods, commenting that cartographers have a bias toward visuality over other modes of interfacing with the world. While this critique is well-taken, as sight is the sense that people value and rely on over the other senses, I find it a bit outdated. Over the past twenty years, mapmakers have been innovating in terms of what kinds of data can be mapped, and this has included the expansion and integration of multi-sensory data into cartographic projects. After all, our senses of touch, sight, sound, movement, body position, smell, taste, and internal sensation all work together to interpret reality. I do multi-sensory mapping projects with my own students. Here are 3 of my favorite multi-sensory cartographic methods you can use on your own or with your students. 

Soundscapes

Our first multi-sensory map is a collective soundscape mapping project using ESRI StoryMaps. Students are split into small groups and are assigned a site on campus–the dining hall, the library, the quad, etc. Students go to their assigned site and close their eyes, focusing in on only what they can hear. What kinds of sounds create this place? How loud is it here? Are the sounds uniform in pitch? Can they pick out any patterns or melodies? Students are encouraged to make recordings and take decibel measurements in addition to recording their aural observations. When we regroup as a class, students create a collective StoryMap, where they describe the sonic landscape of their site and embed their sound recordings. 

Foregrounding sonic stimuli apart from their visual accompaniments challenges preconceptions about urban life. As architect Usue Ruiz Arana notes in an interview about her book Urban Soundscapes, “We often think of the urban environment as sound-negative, while we address natural sounds such as birds singing, as positive. But to quote John Cage: ‘If we listen to Beethoven or Mozart, you see they are always the same. But if you listen to traffic, you see it’s always different.’” 

Great, public examples of StoryMap soundscapes include this Soundscape of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, Underwater Sounds of the U.S. National Marine Sanctuary System, and the Sounds of the Wild West. 

Scent Maps

Similar to soundscapes, scent maps eschew visual predominance in favor of our olfactory sense. During this project, students go off on a meandering journey around campus. They are tasked with taking olfactory observation notes as they move slowly from site to site. What is this place in terms of scent alone? Are there multiple, competing smells? Or just one overpowering scent? Is it pleasant? Gross? What does it remind you of? When students return to class, they make a map of their journey, using only the scents they observed to mark their path. 

Before heading out on their olfactory explorations, I show students examples of creative scent maps like Dr. Kate McLean’s smellscapes. My favorites of hers include an olfactory map of a hospital as experienced by the patients, workers, and visitors; a crowd-sourced map of sniffs around Astor Place in the summertime; and a scentscape of Singapore.

Interoceptscapes 

If you’re still thinking humans only use five senses, you’re in for a fun surprise. In addition to the classic five, we have three more: our senses of orientation, proprioception, and interoception. Interoception is our ability to perceive internal bodily stimuli, whether that’s hunger, sleepiness, joy, or sadness. In short, interoception is what gives us the power to answer the question, “How do you feel?”

Even though interoception senses internal body states, body states are largely influenced by the places we’re in. This is where true multi-sensory integration comes into play. A comfortable seat in the way back of a warm lecture hall might make us feel sleepy in the middle of the day, while a lively basketball game can make us feel alert, excited, and a bit anxious. Cinnebon directs the vents to their ovens to the storefronts, so the scent makes passerbys suddenly feel peckish for a sweet snack. 

For this mapping project, students choose a place made up of a collection of sites, whether that be buildings, streets, or city blocks. The place should be somewhere they regularly frequent. Over the course of a few weeks, students tune in to their interoceptive sense each time they traverse through their selected place. They keep a field journal, noting their bodily sensations from site to site. At the end of the data collection period, students make a map of their place using only their interoceptive data, generating a map of their feelings-in-place. One student made a map of every place they felt hunger and included the nearby restaurants. Another student mapped their hometown during winter break by every place where they either laughed or cried.   

To give a sense of what interoceptive mapping can look like, students are shown maps like the RISD CRY project, where an architecture student has her classmates contribute to a map of the Rhode Island School of Design campus based on where they’ve cried to critique the pressures of artistic productivity. 

These multi-sensory mapping projects subvert the long-held dominance of visuality in cartography, inviting us to reinterpret places not as they appear to our eyes, but as rich, embodied spaces of experience. By incorporating sound, scent, and internal sensation, we can engage more deeply with place—learning to attune ourselves to the complex ways in which place is in dialectical relation with perception and knowledge production. This shift toward multi-sensory mapping isn’t just a pedagogical tool; it’s a powerful reminder that our ways of knowing the world are always filtered through our bodies, which, in turn, are filtered through our environments. As cartography continues to evolve, embracing sensory integration helps create fuller representations of the world around us.

Related Resources

For insights on how to use ESRI StoryMaps, check out Digital Fellow Parisa’s Tagging the Tower post on StoryMaps and visual storytelling.

For reflections on collective maps, Parisa has another great piece on participatory mapping practices.