In 2011, the Boston-based artist Yu-Wen Wu looked up how she might walk from Beantown to Taiwan, to visit her ailing grandmother. She had looked up airline tickets, but they were astronomical. At the time Google Maps was still in its infancy, and so the site compiled and returned detailed results about how she could walk the continental U.S. and then kayak from the West Coast to Hawai’i on to Japan and finally to Taipei.
