Which is more iconic New York: the Empire State Building or a band of dirty pigeons?  While visitors to the Big Apple may or may not experience the city through its architectural landmarks, it’s a pretty sure bet that any trek through Mnahattan will involve an encounter with a pigeon or two (or fifty).  Abecedarium: NYC capitalizes on the city’s eccentricities by creating a map that reflects on the history, geography, and culture of New York City through 26 words. Make that 26 unusual words. Words like Georgic (”a poem to agriculture”), Kermis (”a festival”) and Welkin (”the vault of heaven, the sky”).  Each word is mapped to a location in New York and connects to an original video, picture and/or audio track that both describes the word (helpful, in case you’re lost on what “umbel” means) and shows it relationship to the cityscape.

The result is a multimedia interpretation of the city as seen through the eyes of a dictionary. For instance, Holus Bolus (”all at once”) includes a video that seems to feature a day in the life of a flock of NYC pigeons while Audile (”one who thinks in sounds rather than visual images”) reveals a sound tour of the city, a sort of urban symphony of honking cars and street rappers.

While the content on the main site is curated by the project’s directors, users can contribute their own interpretations and experiences of the words on the site’s blog.  The contributions range from the quotidian to the quintessential: posts related to Georgic include a video of the greener side of the east village and an ode to the Park Slope food co-op.

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