“Here are my maps,” he said, excavating a few pieces of paper from his bag. He pointed to one that was wet from Sammy Davis, Junior, Ju- nior. Her tongue, I hoped. “This is Trachimbrod,” he said. “It’s also called Sofiowka on certain maps. This is Lutsk. This is Kolki. It’s an old map. Most of the places we’re looking for aren’t on new maps. Here,” he said, and presented it to me. “You can see where we have to go. This is all I have, these maps and the photograph. It’s not much.”

In the cinematic version of the novel,  by Liev Schreiber (2005), this “memory work” is presented in the form of collecting.

The collector (and author; and, in the movie version only, the protagonist of the story) carefully selects seemingly unrelated fragments, and places them on an invisible map, a map that cannot, as we will learn, ever be recovered in full. In fact, these fragments are objects—more precisely, the cultural objects of a displaced/vanished culture. His collection is what in class we have been calling an archive of the invisible.

Physiologically, we are virtually identical to our ancestors who painted images of bison on the walls of the Lascaux cave in France, among the earliest cultural artifacts to have survived to the present day. Our brains are no larger or more sophisticated than theirs. If one of their babies were to be dropped into the arms of an adoptive parent in twenty-first-century New York, the child would likely grow up indistinguishable from his or her peers.

All that differentiates us from them is our memories. Not the memories that reside in our own brains, for the child born today enters the world just as much a blank slate as the child born thirty thousand years ago, but rather the memories that are stored outside ourselves—in books, photographs, museums, and these days in digital media. Once upon a time, memory was at the root of all culture, but over the last thirty millennia since humans began painting their memories on cave walls, we’ve gradually supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids—a process that has sped up exponentially in recent years. Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that all the world’s ink had become invisible and all our bytes had disappeared. Our world would immediately crumble. Literature, music, law, politics, science, math: Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our own transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality. It allows ideas to be efficiently passed across time and space, and for one idea to build on another to a degree not possible when a thought has to be passed from brain to brain in order to be sustained.

The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory. It’s a telling statement that pretty much the only place where you’ll find people still training their memories is at the World Memory Championship and the dozen national memory contests held around the globe. What was once a cornerstone of Western culture is now at best a curiosity. But as our culture has transformed from one that was fundamentally based on internal memories to one that is fundamentally based on memories stored outside the brain, what are the implications for ourselves and for our society? What we’ve gained is indisputable. But what have we traded away? What does it mean that we’ve lost our memory?

In our class discussion, we explored how the two extreme approaches to “memory work” (remembering and forgetting, acquiring and losing) expressed by the “Safran Foer Brothers” meet in the gesture of collecting and placing “memory objects” on a map, however imaginary it may be.

We also discussed how museums are environment in which memory can be performed as a modern enactment of ancient memory practices that pre-date the advent of writing, and of the printing press.

Finally, we began to evaluate how today’s digital mapping practices—in the form of the digital footprints left by GPS-enabled portable devices, of online “reviews” of places ranging from cultural venues to restaurants to hospitals—can be linked to the “memory work” brought forth by our sources.

In doing so, we also “played” with Google Maps:

Our collaborative exercise, however, went beyond the idea of locating a place of interest on a map and sharing it with “friends.” Instead, we attempted to perform what, at first sight, should be a fairly simple feat: add a selection of significant achievements in the history of the University of California, Berkeley, to a Google Map. Here’s an example of a map made by students in class.

In doing so, we realized that we needed more than one campus map to achieve our goal. We used the map that is available via the UC Berkeley portal, but also resources made available by the Environmental Design Library and Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association websites. (Big thanks to Susan Powell, the fabulous GIS & Map Librarian at UC Berkeley, for the invaluable inspiration she provided in conceiving this in-class activity!).

We also soon realized that we needed to make very important decisions regarding the location of events that were not immediately “mappable,” thus evaluating whether they would be represented on our maps at all.

In considering our daily mapping activities, and the immediacy of GIS tools available to many of us (in this part of the world), in the context of memory work, we were thus immediately confronted with the implications of remembering and forgetting, of “having” and “losing” a memory, or history, and how tenuous memory is when people, and cultures, are in motion. At the same time, by practicing the gesture of connecting knowledge to a place (history to a map, in our case), we also began reflecting on the power of memory, and its essential role in mapping diasporas, or cultures in motion.