Crowdmapping colonialism and occupation

Perusing through the photos on Panoramio, a platform that georeferences photos and places them on the Google Earth map, I came across a number of users – mostly Portuguese – who have put images from their time in Portuguese Timor in the 1960s and 1970s.

This and reading about the efforts of veterans of the Colonial Wars in Africa to “piece together the puzzle of memory” got me thinking about the power of technology in the future to help fully invoke the room of mirrors, or palimpsest, that (is/)was (post)colonialism.

I spent hours, many hours fueled by Tiger during the dark evenings of 2006, sorting through terms of vassalage and kings (and sometimes queens), attempting to plot them on a map with Professor.