Despite of being in New York physically for only two weeks, I feel like knowing the city in some way at the back of my head. Besides the prevailing promotions of New York, perhaps my initial recognition of the city were gained through movies and TV series I’ve been seeing over the last ten years. I started watching Friends and Sex and the City back in elementary school, and then there was Gossip Girl in high school, which I watched every episode at least twice and seriously wept when the series ended. It was Gossip Girl that mapped out the basic borough locations in my head, always contrasting the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and left deep impressions of the iconic buildings in New York, namely the Empire State Building and the Columbia University Library. Thus, I decided to plot my very version of New York City based on the cognition I obtained from these screenplays.  This is also inspired by the “A seven day circle of ground” map in James Corer’s The Agency of Mapping, which claimed that maps can be “openly cognitive, mental maps, rendering new images of space and relationship.” The names of the movies and TV series are distributed either by the place where it’s filmed, as in the case of Gossip Girl, or by the scenery from which I have the deepest memory, like Begin Again is located on the Brooklyn Bridge as my favorite clip from the movie was when Gretta was shooting a video with Dave when they firstly arrived upon New York.  In this way, my map is not only representing the architecture or other urban elements of New York, nor simply the names of the screenplays, but a combination of both and constantly reminding me the amazing scenes that were filmed on this piece of magic land. I guess the perception of the city we have is not solely based on physical experience, but greatly influenced by movies, books and other types of social art. Â
