Call for Papers: Digital Geographies and the Everyday

RGS-IBG Postgraduate Forum Midterm Conference, 19^th – 23^rd April 2021

Date and time: Thursday 22^nd April 2021, 1500 – 1700 BST, via Zoom

Sponsored by the Digital Geographies Research Group (DGRG)

As digital technologies have become increasingly and unevenly entangled in everyday life on a global scale, so has their influence on the everyday phenomena we might participate in and choose to study as geographers. The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown into sharp relief the ways digital technology can shape what we research, how we do research and how we share research, perhaps more than we might have intended. Inequalities in everyday access to digital tools can create ‘digital divides’ at both local and global scales, while the diverse application of digital technologies has influenced a wide range of cultural practices across the world. These may be mundane, creative, ethically problematic, violent, innovative – sometimes many of these words at once, and others besides.

This centrality of the digital to today’s geographical praxis has been illustrated evocatively by Ash, Kitchin and Leszczynski (2016), who have charted the current ‘digital turn’ as one provoked by engagement with geographies through the digital, geographies produced by the digital, and geographies of the digital. With this same broad scope, we invite proposals for digital shorts (videos summarising research in 2-5 minutes) that engage with a range of everyday geographies through, produced by, and of the digital.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

·  Research methods involving digital technology

·  Creative practices using digital technology

·  Digital infrastructures

·  Regional digital geographies – particularly perspectives from the Global South

·  Forms of digital labour

·  Digital technologies, health and wellbeing

·  Digital arts and entertainment

·  Digital access and digital divides

·  Social media and sharing (dis)information online

·  Forms of digital mapping

The digital shorts will be pre-recorded by participants and then watched live on Zoom during the session, followed by questions and discussion. The format of the discussion will be decided once we have received submissions.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Jack Lowe (jack.lowe.2017@rhul.ac.uk) and Daisy Curtis (d.curtis@exeter.ac.uk) by 5^th March 2021.

Making The Gates to Dreamland: (Dis-)locating a Story

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On 25^th September, my new locative audiowalk game The Gates to Dreamland launched to the public. Created as part of the A Different LENS project in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how interpreting our surroundings figuratively, through imagination and motion, can connect us to different places, times, stories and circumstances, finding resonance within our own lives.

Set around the boundaries of the Dreamland amusement park in Margate, it tells the story of Italian scientist Galileo Galilei’s journey towards publishing his final book – one that would change the study of science forever. It imagines the obstacles he faced, under house arrest with his eyesight and health failing, and the changes in perspective that entailed.

In this series of blog posts, I’m delving into how The Gates to Dreamland was made, discussing how my contribution to A Different LENS came about, how the design of the project evolved, ideas and inspirations, research and planning, writing the script, how I created the audio, and how this project connects to my other work.

More information on how you can try The Gates to Dreamland for yourself is at the bottom of this post.

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With most location-based media, we are used to experiencing content that directly relates to the place we’re in. This is one of the unique qualities of these media – that you can draw on the characteristics of a precise location to tell stories, provoke play, educate, inform and entertain people in an intimate, ‘immersive’ way.

But we can think about these affordances in a different way. Creating an engaging piece of location-based media isn’t just about referring to things you can sense in your surroundings, but the content being enhanced by them in some way.

I asked myself: how can the telling of Galileo’s story be brought to life through the environments of 21^st-century Margate?

In answering this question, the key example I turned to for inspiration was a video game called Dear Esther.

In Dear Esther, you navigate the bleak, rugged landscape of a Hebridean island, listening to a man reading letters to his deceased wife, Esther. While some of what you hear seems connected to details found on the island, many of the events described by the unreliable narrator evidently happened elsewhere. Locations such as Wolverhampton, Damascus and the M5 between Exeter and Bristol are named, as well as a host of characters and incidents detached from what you can see and hear in your environment.

Example of dis-locative narration in Dear Esther

It becomes apparent that the island’s landscapes may be as imaginary as they are real; taking on figurative – symbolic and metaphorical – roles in the player’s journey through a story of grief, loss and redemption.

Symbolic landscapes in Dear Esther

With this form of storytelling, it matters less whether you find all the possible connections between your surroundings and the overarching story. What’s most important is that when you do make a connection, your relationship with the storyworld becomes that much more intimate because you’ve made the connection yourself.

The role of a narrator isn’t to guide you but to offer narrative prompts that invite you to uncover this emotional resonance in your surroundings.

I wondered whether Dear Esther’s figurative approach might be similarly effective in a location-based narrative – as a way of connecting distant places and times through symbolism and metaphor, while ensuring that the experience was still embedded in the player’s navigation of their physical surroundings.

It struck me that this approach would be a thematic fit for Dreamland, as a place which pulls on the imagination in both name and practice, despite currently being inaccessible.

But what connection could I draw between Dreamland and the actual events of Galileo’s life?

The answer, appropriately, came in thinking about Galileo’s deteriorating sight. I started to conceptualise his growing blindness as a transition from seeing things literally to only being able to picture them in the mind – a journey towards entering his own ‘Dreamland’.

Coupled with his struggle to overcome the significant personal challenges that writing Two New Sciences presented, this period of Galileo’s life appeared to connect with the notion of ‘dreams’ in more ways than one.

The next challenge would be to determine the specific locations around Dreamland that would feature in my work.

The webapp we used to host and map the projects in A Different LENS, CGeoMap, gave some basic location specifications to work with. I knew that each point had to be at least 40 metres apart. I also knew that I could make certain points invisible on the map until the user reaches the relevant location.

To be sure I’d finish making the audiowalk in time for the project launch, I also knew I wanted to keep the number of points to a maximum of 5 or 6; focusing on making these entries as evocative as possible. Given that my story would be reflecting a series of events in Galileo’s life, it made sense for the points to be linear in their organisation.

The Gates to Dreamland points on the A Different LENS map

After that, the decision on locations was purely a creative one, aside from the usual caveats of the sites being publicly accessible and the walk not being too long.

In thinking about the inaccessibility of Dreamland at the time and the circumstances surrounding Galileo’s house arrest, I was particularly drawn to gates as symbolising some kind of passage or journey, while denying that passage at the same time. They are physical obstacles, yet provoke you to imagine what is beyond them; liminal spaces between here and there, inside and outside, near and far.

Dreamland has two main entrances for visitors: from the car park and from Hall by the Sea Road.

However, a quick search on Google Streetview revealed a few smaller gates dotted around the perimeter of the park. Including the two main entrances, these entrances are labelled as Gates A to E. Conveniently, they are also quite evenly spaced and all separated by gaps of more than 40 metres.

Dreamland's Gate A on Google Streetview

Running with the idea of these five gates being the points for my audiowalk, I then attempted to decipher connections between what could be found at these sites and the events in Galileo’s life during the writing of Two New Sciences.

I created a design document that charted the arc of Galileo’s story, from returning to Florence under house arrest, to the publishing of Two New Sciences. This was divided into five key story beats, which later became six.

In the same document, I then listed all the physical features I could identify at each of Dreamland’s gates and along the routes between them. Due to the pandemic restrictions, I was unable to visit the sites in person, so I relied on close observation of Google Streetview images.

Finally, I attempted to find connections between the beats of Galileo’s story and the physical characteristics I’d noted for each of the sites.

The key to this task was to identify the emotional resonance of the events in Galileo’s life that I’d pinpointed. Once I’d done that, I could think about which details at each site might chime with this ambiance in ways that were compelling and reflective of the wider themes I wanted to explore.

I go into this process in more detail in this series’ next blog post, where I’ll be discussing the process of creating the script for The Gates to Dreamland.

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How to try The Gates to Dreamland from home

The Gates to Dreamland is primarily designed to be experienced by walking at the relevant sites in Margate. When you load the A Different LENS map on mobile, only the first of my six entries is visible on the map, and you must discover the remainder by finding the rest of Dreamland's gates in person.

However, you can try a version of The Gates to Dreamland for yourself online via PC/Mac (this is the only way to access all six points of the audiowalk without being in Margate).

To do this, visit the A Different LENS map here and find the blue pin titled ‘The Gates to Dreamland’, with ‘1 of 6’ as a subheading (it is the most southerly blue pin in the main cluster). This is the start of the walk, while the pink pins that lead from it show the route you need to follow. Read the introduction and instructions that appear when you click on the pin.

Then, open up the link here in a separate tab. This is the starting point for the walk in Streetview.

Each point of the audiowalk is located by one of Dreamland’s gates. When you reach the next gate on the walk, navigate back to the A Different LENS map and click on the relevant pin to play the audio for that location. Try to stay in Streetview as much as you can on the walk, but there may be times when you need to check that you’re at the correct location by switching to satellite view and comparing with the A Different LENS map.

The walk should take about 30 minutes to complete. Think about the relationships between the words you hear and what you can see in Streetview.

If you do try it and have any feedback you’d be willing to share, do send me an email using the contact information on my About page.

Making The Gates to Dreamland: Discovering Galileo

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On 25^th September, my new locative audiowalk game The Gates to Dreamland launched to the public. Created as part of the A Different LENS project in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how interpreting our surroundings figuratively, through imagination and motion, can connect us to different places, times, stories and circumstances, finding resonance within our own lives.

Set around the boundaries of the Dreamland amusement park in Margate, it tells the story of Italian scientist Galileo Galilei’s journey towards publishing his final book – one that would change the study of science forever. It imagines the obstacles he faced, under house arrest with his eyesight and health failing, and the changes in perspective that entailed.

In this series of blog posts, I’m going to delve into how The Gates to Dreamland was made, discussing how my contribution to A Different LENS came about, how the design of the project evolved, ideas and inspirations, research and planning, writing the script, how I created the audio, and how this project connects to my other work.

More information on how you can try The Gates to Dreamland for yourself is at the bottom of this post.

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For a while in the summer I struggled to believed that I could come up with a brand-new, workable idea for my contribution to the A Different LENS map, and get it made in time for a September launch.

In the regular Monday Zoom calls we had as artists contributing to the project, I spent some time chatting to the others about my predicament. By this point, I think we had all become enamoured by the idea of Galileo being represented on the map, and particularly that there would be entries connecting to Dreamland, one of Margate’s most iconic landmarks.

A couple of the artists suggested that I could shift my focus towards imagining being in Dreamland from outside; of wanting to be in Dreamland but being unable to enter.

I agreed that, in some ways, this sense of Dreamland being unreachable or distant had clearer links to the project’s themes around inaccessibility. But, with my head still full of my original concept’s playful ideas, I struggled to see how I could curate an experience of Dreamland from the outside that was genuinely engaging, or what form this would take.

Looking for inspiration, I turned my attention back to learning more about Galileo.

Where before I had focused on the Two New Sciences text, and how to communicate the scientific principles debated within it, this time I focused more on Galileo as a person. As I did, a more evocative image of his character began to emerge.

In the years before Galileo started writing Two New Sciences, he had faced challenges ranging from the personal to the profound.

The publication of his previous work, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), caused significant controversy among the Catholic Church. It implied support for the idea that the Earth orbits the Sun, at a time when the Roman Inquisition very actively sought to censor views contradicting Biblical teachings that the Earth was the centre of the universe.

Galileo was tried on suspicion of heresy in 1633, and he was interrogated under threat of physical torture.

When the Inquisition found him “vehemently suspect of heresy,” he was sentenced to indefinite house arrest. It was at this moment that Galileo is alleged to have uttered the famous phrase ‘E pur si muove’ – ‘And yet it moves’, referring to the Earth. There is no direct proof that this actually happened, though.          

After a brief stay with a sympathetic Archbishop in Siena, in 1634 he returned to his villa in Arcetri, on the outskirts of Florence, where he remained under watch by armed guards for the rest of his life.

The entirety of Two New Sciences was written during his confinement.

Galileo's villa in Arcetri, Florence

This period was also one of significant medical hardship for Galileo.

During my research, I found an academic paper detailing Galileo’s clinical history in remarkable detail. Alongside chronic pains caused by arthritis and a serious hernia, he suffered regularly from palpitations, melancholy and a lack of appetite.

The most profound bodily change he experienced in these later years, however, was to his vision. It gradually worsened over the course of his confinement, to the point where he eventually lost all sight shortly before Two New Sciences was completed and published.

“All light is extinguished […] The blindness is a consequence of a very dense cloud which formed itself in the space of seven months, first in the right eye and then in the left eye […] that sky, that world, that universe which I, through my astonishing observations and clear demonstrations, had expanded hundred and thousand times beyond anything ever seen before by scientists, has now shrunk and narrowed as to reach no further than my own body.”

Letter from Galileo to Elia Diodati, 2^nd January 1638

Portrait of Galileo in 1624, with visible swelling in his right eye

Despite these circumstances, Galileo wasn’t completely isolated from society. In fact, he was able to regularly welcome a large number of visitors to his home, including academic colleagues, students and other acquaintances. He even met with a young John Milton – the subject of Virginia Fitch’s contribution to A Different LENS – in an event that had a profound impact on the Englishman.

One of the students who visited Galileo at this time was Vincenzo Viviani (1622 – 1703), a talented young mathematician who ended up living with Galileo as his assistant until his death in 1642.

Even in this relatively short time, Galileo provided a life-long direction for Viviani, who subsequently devoted himself to collating and preserving Galileo’s works to be published, as well as writing a biography.

Vincenzo Viviani, 1622-1703

Viviani went on to make his own achievements, but the extent of Galileo’s influence on him is still evident in Florence today. The Palazzo del Cartelloni displays a bust of Galileo alongside three Latin epigraphs celebrating Galileo’s life and discoveries, which Viviani commissioned.

Bust of Galileo and epigraphs celebrating his life outside the Palazzo del Cartelloni in Florence, which was owned by Viviani

Furthermore, Galileo’s elaborate tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce was partly built using funds left by Viviani for this specific purpose. When the church finally allowed Galileo to be reburied there, Viviani’s remains were moved to the grave alongside his hero.

Galileo's tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence. He wasn't allowed a Christian burial until 1737, 95 years after his death

Taken altogether, the events surrounding the writing of Two New Sciences painted a poignant picture of transcending life’s adversities. Despite the harrowing circumstances Galileo faced, his sharing of knowledge brought people together, connecting distance places, times, people and objects.

It certainly seemed like a worthwhile story to tell that resonated clearly with the wider themes of A Different LENS.

The challenge I then faced as a designer was how to connect these events from Galileo’s life in 17^th-century Florence to Dreamland in 21^st-century Margate.

The next post in this series discusses how I set about bringing Galileo’s story to life through the environments around Dreamland.

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How to try The Gates to Dreamland from home

The Gates to Dreamland is primarily designed to be experienced by walking at the relevant sites in Margate. When you load the A Different LENS map on mobile, only the first of my six entries is visible on the map, and you must discover the remainder by finding the rest of Dreamland's gates in person.

However, you can try a version of The Gates to Dreamland for yourself online via PC/Mac (this is the only way to access all six points of the audiowalk without being in Margate).

To do this, visit the A Different LENS map here and find the blue pin titled ‘The Gates to Dreamland’, with ‘1 of 6’ as a subheading (it is the most southerly blue pin in the main cluster). This is the start of the walk, while the pink pins that lead from it show the route you need to follow. Read the introduction and instructions that appear when you click on the pin.

Then, open up the link here in a separate tab. This is the starting point for the walk in Streetview.

Each point of the audiowalk is located by one of Dreamland’s gates. When you reach the next gate on the walk, navigate back to the A Different LENS map and click on the relevant pin to play the audio for that location. Try to stay in Streetview as much as you can on the walk, but there may be times when you need to check that you’re at the correct location by switching to satellite view and comparing with the A Different LENS map.

The walk should take about 30 minutes to complete. Think about the relationships between the words you hear and what you can see in Streetview.

If you do try it and have any feedback you’d be willing to share, do send me an email using the contact information on my About page.

Making The Gates to Dreamland: First Steps

---------------------------

On 25^th September, my new locative audiowalk game The Gates to Dreamland launched to the public. Created as part of the A Different LENS project in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how interpreting our surroundings figuratively, through imagination and motion, can connect us to different places, times, stories and circumstances, finding resonance within our own lives.

Set around the boundaries of the Dreamland amusement park in Margate, it tells the story of Italian scientist Galileo Galilei’s journey towards publishing his final book – one that would change the study of science forever. It imagines the obstacles he faced, under house arrest with his eyesight and health failing, and the changes in perspective that entailed.

In this series of blog posts, I’m going to delve into how The Gates to Dreamland was made, discussing how my contribution to A Different LENS came about, how the design of the project evolved, ideas and inspirations, research and planning, writing the script, how I created the audio, and how this project connects to my other work.

More information on how you can try The Gates to Dreamland for yourself is at the bottom of this post.

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It was back in May when I first heard from Elspeth (Billie) Penfold, the curator of A Different LENS.

I had only just launched Canterbury in 3 Words, a location-based storytelling game played using the What3Words app. But after following Billie on Twitter, she got in touch to say that her and the other artists involved in A Different LENS had been talking about my work.

Identifying some connections between my game and what A Different LENS aimed to achieve, she asked if I’d be interested in getting involved, sending me a project brief and arranging a phone call with me shortly afterward.

The brief struck some promising chords immediately: artists contributing to a widely-accessible digital map that would lead participants on creative walks around different sites in Margate. I could see clear links to my interests and prior work with locative media, the walking arts and site-specific storytelling, as well as the potential for playful contributions.

What I found challenging about the brief, however, was that contributing artists had to respond to a piece of writing by a blind or visually-impaired author in their entries for the A Different LENS map.

When searching online, I found that many of the most famous blind writers had already been chosen by other artists on the project. I also wasn’t aware that any of the more obscure literature I’d read had been written by people with visual impairments.

So I decided to expand my search beyond just ‘writers’ who were blind. And that’s when I found that Galileo Galilei, the famous Italian scientist, had gone blind around the time he published his final book.

The Discourses and Mathematical Relations Relating to Two New Sciences, published in 1638, brought together many of Galileo’s most important findings on kinematics and strength of materials, helping to shape the study of modern physics. Galileo died only 4 years after its publication in 1642.

In particular, it outlined possibly Galileo’s most impactful scientific discovery: that acceleration due to gravity is a constant value, irrespective of an object’s mass. It also contained some of Galileo’s other notable findings, such as those relating to pendulums (he proved, for instance, that the period of a pendulum is the same irrespective of the amplitude of the swing).

In thinking about places in Margate that had some kind of connection to Galileo, I began to think more and more about these physical phenomena that Galileo studied. I was thinking about where you might see evidence of them in Margate, and that’s when my attention turned to Dreamland amusement park.

Dreamland's historic Scenic Railway

Clearly, when it comes to rides at amusement parks, the motion of bodies and the forces experienced are key considerations in their design. Online, I even found teaching resources using the example of amusement parks to teach students specifically about the physical principles that Galileo first outlined.

It occurred to me that a locative walk through an amusement park like Dreamland could be an engaging platform for people to learn the science by witnessing it in action. But how could I make this an evocative, unique experience, and not just a science lesson?       

When doing more research on Two New Sciences, one of the details that captured my imagination was the writing style. Galileo wrote his scientific manuscripts as dialogues between three characters: Simplicio (reflecting Galileo’s early beliefs as a young man), Sagredo (representing Galilieo’s middle years) and Salviati (representing Galileo’s latest understandings).

This struck me as a surprisingly creative method of communicating scientific knowledge, and I wondered if it could be rekindled somehow for today’s audience.

I already had an idea about how to playfully tie the words of the three characters to the locations in Dreamland.

In the making of Canterbury in 3 Words, I had recently been working with the What3Words platform, a service that divides the world into three-metre squares and gives each one a unique 3-word address (e.g. home.rinse.apply, on Dreamland’s Scenic Railway).

I wanted to find a way for each of Galileo's three characters to communicate a word of the 3-word address for each point on the walk, directing participants on their journey. I wasn’t sure exactly how this would work yet, but the symmetry between the three characters and 3-word addresses seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

In an attempt to flesh out this early idea for my contribution to A Different LENS, I wrote this blurb: 

bodies.in.motion

This idea seeks to explore The Discourses and Mathematical Relations Relating to Two New Sciences by Galileo Galilei. This was the final book Galileo wrote, covering much of his work in physics, and had to be rushed at the end as he became blind before it was finished.

In Two New Sciences, Galileo introduces his subject matter as a dialogue between three characters, Simplicio, Sagredo and Salviati. These figures represent Galileo at different stages of his life, with Simplicio being the youngest and Salviati the oldest. These discussions take place over a period of four ‘days’, with each day covering a new topic, ranging from acceleration to the motion of projectiles.

bodies.in.motion aims to guide participants on a walk that navigates the spaces of Dreamland amusement park, where they will be able to observe and/or hear Galileo’s physical principles in action. This will use the What3Words geolocation system and app, which divides the world up into 3-metre squares and assigns each one a three-word address. For each of the locations participants navigate to in Dreamland, one of the words of its What3Words address will be spoken by each of Galileo’s three characters. Once the location is reached, participants will read and/or listen to a simplified dialogue that explains one of Galileo’s principles at an appropriate part of the park (e.g. the Pendulum ride for thinking about acceleration of falling bodies).

The main focus of the work will be on drawing attention to the creative ways that scientific ideas can be communicated more accessibly, drawing inspiration from Galileo’s use of dialogues between characters. There is a comparison here to how What3Words ‘translates’ the geometric, mathematical properties of GPS coordinates into words, which are easier to communicate and take on greater cultural significance. In this way, the work aims to respond to the project brief and aspirations around making the inaccessible accessible, overcoming challenges and seeing our surroundings differently.

I held onto this concept for quite a long time, as PhD commitments limited opportunities to develop the work further for a couple of months. I was also waiting to hear news about when Dreamland would re-open after the first lockdown, as my design relied on people being able to walk between the rides inside Dreamland and see them in action.

By July, Dreamland still hadn’t re-opened, and eventually the decision was made to keep it closed for the remainder of the summer.

I had to contend with the fact that my idea simply wouldn’t work in the timescale needed for A Different LENS, which was due to launch in September.

I needed a fresh approach; one that could operate beyond the confines of Dreamland amusement park. 

Little did I realise exactly how far the project's reach would extend.

The next post in this series explores how learning more about Galileo's life provided the inspiration for the project’s story.

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How to try The Gates to Dreamland from home

The Gates to Dreamland is primarily designed to be experienced by walking at the relevant sites in Margate. When you load the A Different LENS map on mobile, only the first of my six entries is visible on the map, and you must discover the remainder by finding the rest of Dreamland's gates in person.

However, you can try a version of The Gates to Dreamland for yourself online via PC/Mac (this is the only way to access all six points of the audiowalk without being in Margate).

To do this, visit the A Different LENS map here and find the blue pin titled ‘The Gates to Dreamland’, with ‘1 of 6’ as a subheading (it is the most southerly blue pin in the main cluster). This is the start of the walk, while the pink pins that lead from it show the route you need to follow. Read the introduction and instructions that appear when you click on the pin.

Then, open up the link here in a separate tab. This is the starting point for the walk in Streetview.

Each point of the audiowalk is located by one of Dreamland’s gates. When you reach the next gate on the walk, navigate back to the A Different LENS map and click on the relevant pin to play the audio for that location. Try to stay in Streetview as much as you can on the walk, but there may be times when you need to check that you’re at the correct location by switching to satellite view and comparing with the A Different LENS map.

The walk should take about 30 minutes to complete. Think about the relationships between the words you hear and what you can see in Streetview.

If you do try it and have any feedback you’d be willing to share, do send me an email using the contact information on my About page.

Mapping Space | Mapping Time | Mapping Texts Conference Poster

On 29th September, the Mapping Space | Mapping Time | Mapping Texts Conference was held online by Chronotopic Cartographies, in partnership with the British Library. Chronotopic Cartographies is a research project at Lancaster University, developing digital methods and tools that enable the mapping of literary works.

This interdisciplinary conference aimed to explore creative, conceptual and digital methods of mapping the spaces and times of a range of texts, bringing together fields as varied as the digital humanities, cartography, geography, literature, narratology and gaming. It asked what mapping a text can reveal and the challenges of doing so; how we can meaningfully connect the digital, imaginative and actual spaces of literary texts; and what methods and models might be useful in these endeavours.

This conference was originally due to be held in person at the British Library in July, but after the full scale of the pandemic became apparent earlier in the year, it moved completely online. Instead of presenting papers, delegates were invited to submit posters of their research to be displayed on a virtual poster wall on Flickr. Participants could then network via chatrooms on Microsoft Teams, or in Gathertown –  a virtual conference space that allows users to walk up to a person’s avatar and have a separate conversation with them via video call. The keynote presentations still went ahead as recorded videos which were shared in advance, while live Q&As with each presenter were held at designated times throughout the day.

Though it was unfortunate that we couldn’t hear all the papers in full, the conference team handled the online move very effectively, creating a well-organised and flexible format for engaging with each other’s work. On a personal level, this was also the first time I had produced a poster for a conference, and I was grateful to get experience in showcasing my work concisely using only visual means. I was pleased to get some positive feedback on what I’d produced from those who got in touch with me during the conference.

Here is my poster. You can also view it full-size alongside the other fascinating projects featured in the conference here. It outlines the design of my location-based game Canterbury in 3 Words, explaining the research questions I was asking, how the game works, the design challenges I faced, and the observations I made throughout my fieldwork in making and testing the game.

Big thanks to the conference organisers for making this event happen, and the other presenters for sharing such inspiring and thought-provoking projects.

Launching Today: The Gates to Dreamland

For the past three months – alongside my PhD fieldwork, various conference and event contributions, and running my location-based storytelling game Canterbury in 3 Words – I’ve been working hard on a brand-new creative project.

Today sees the launch of my locative audiowalk game, The Gates to Dreamland.

Set around the boundaries of the Dreamland amusement park in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how interpreting our surroundings figuratively, through imagination and motion, can connect us to different places, times, stories and circumstances, finding resonance within our own lives.

The walk tells the story of Italian scientist Galileo Galilei’s journey towards publishing his final book: the obstacles he faced, his eyesight and bodily health failing, and the changes in perspective that entailed.

Here’s a short blurb:

It’s 1634, and Italian scientist Galileo Galilei is under house arrest for heresy, after illustrating that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Bodily health and eyesight failing, he must transcend his situation to continue his scientific work. Follow Galileo’s journey as he attempts to write one final book that will change the study of science forever. A journey that will transform his perspective on the world, connecting distant places and times through imagination and motion.

Find echoes of Galileo’s words at the gates to Dreamland. Six lost diary entries that reveal a path forward – a process of overcoming adversity and encountering your surroundings with a different lens. The recordings will appear on the map as you approach the locations of each gate. Your journey begins at Dreamland’s Gate A.

The Gates to Dreamland was made as part of A Different LENS, a collaborative story mapping project set in Margate, Kent. It explores how we overcome challenging events in our lives, through responses by several Kent-based artists to the writing of visually-impaired authors. Material produced by the artists for the map engages with methods of making the inaccessible accessible through creative means. The map can be accessed via mobile – with users navigating its content by walking at the relevant sites in Margate – or via PC for those unable to walk there physically.

A Different LENS has been funded by Arts Council England, Margate NOW 2020 and Kent County Council, and was created in association with Margate Bookie.

Soon, I’ll be posting here about how The Gates to Dreamland was made, delving into how my contribution to A Different LENS came about, the ideas and inspirations behind the design, the process of creating the audiowalk material itself, and how it connects to my other work.

The project is also likely to develop further. Due to time limitations and my other work commitments, I wasn’t able to incorporate music and soundscaping into the audio as I had planned. Eventually, I’m aiming to compose short pieces to complement the spoken words you hear on the walk.

But for now, you can enjoy this first version of The Gates to Dreamland yourself by visiting the A Different LENS map here, on mobile or PC.        

This audiowalk game is primarily designed to be experienced by walking at the relevant sites in Margate. When you load the map on mobile, only the first of my six entries is visible on the map, and you must discover the remainder for yourself by finding the rest of Dreamland’s gates in person.

This way, you can gauge the full extent of connections between the words you hear and what you can sense in person at the locations. The trip would also give you the opportunity to explore Margate further and enjoy the other artists’ contributions to the map for A Different LENS.

When accessing the map via PC, none of the entries are hidden from view. If you navigate to the relevant locations for my walk in Google Streetview, you could explore the relationships between what you hear and what you observe; perhaps even the place where you’re listening from.

But if you’re local, or if there’s a chance you could be in Margate anytime over the coming months, then I would strongly encourage you to experience The Gates to Dreamland in situ and explore the town using the A Different LENS map.

One final thing to mention.

As part of A Different LENS, walking artist and writer Sonia Overall is coordinating a series of Distance Drifts: synchronised walks that take place on Twitter each Sunday at 10am. Using the hashtag #DistanceDrift, Sonia will be posting prompts for playful walking that connect to the different entries on the map for A Different LENS.

You can participate in #DistanceDrift wherever you are, and walk in whatever way is possible for you – indoors, outdoors, on wheels, assisted, etc. If you can, share stories and images of your responses to the prompts using the hashtag.

This Sunday (27^th September), #DistanceDrift will include a response to The Gates to Dreamland! It would be wonderful to see some of you there on Twitter.

I must end with a huge thanks to Elspeth (Billie) Penfold for her sterling work in curating A Different LENS and inviting me to participate. It is not an easy job to coordinate between several individual artists, organisations and event organisers, arrange regular group meetings, write (and succeed!) with funding applications, advertise the project, upload and edit creative content, and contribute to the map creatively herself. I’m particularly grateful for her patience as I juggled my contribution with my academic work and other commitments, and her persistent reminders to have fun with the project.

Thanks and congratulations also to the other participating artists for their inspiring contributions and helpful discussion in earlier stages of the project. And of course, we’re all indebted to Arts Council England, Margate NOW 2020, Margate Bookie and Kent County Council for supporting and funding this project.

Location-Based Games and Place: A YouTube Playlist

On 26^th August, I took part in the 2020 RGS-IBG Postgraduate Forum Twitter Conference.

This conference was organised after many academic events were postponed or cancelled as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, meaning that postgraduate geographers have had limited opportunities to share and receive feedback on their work, as well as connecting with other scholars.

For this conference, participants were asked to present their research in 5 tweets. This meant not only adhering to the 280-character limit for each tweet, but also finding creative ways to demonstrate research findings using images, videos, GIFs, emojis, and more.       

As I’m approaching the final year of my PhD, when I’ll be writing up what I’ve found from the past couple of years of research, I thought that the most useful approach to this task would be to think through how I’ll be structuring my research findings in my thesis.

For my conference tweets, I decided to make three short videos (3-4 minutes each), outlining what I’ve learnt about the significance of location-based games for thinking about how people experience place in today’s digitally-mediated world. These draw on examples from my practice-based PhD fieldwork, for which I have been making and testing location-based games myself.

Each video focuses thematically on a particular set of research questions, design challenges and observations I have encountered during my research on location-based games, and connects to a substantive chapter of my thesis:

Interfacing Multiplicity: How can location-based games account for, and engage with, this diversity of embodied, discursive and material elements that make places meaningful? And how is this multiplicity, and the platforms used to interface it, experienced by players?

Bounding Contingency: How can developers of location-based games negotiate the limitations, specificities and contingencies that come with designing games set in physical locations? And how do players themselves negotiate these affordances; how does the playing of games set in physical locations enable people to engage with place in particular ways?

Structuring Feeling: How can we design location-based games that make the process of interacting with a place engaging, meaningful and evocative? What kinds of unique experiences and subjectivities might emerge from the gameplay?

I have now shared these videos as a playlist on YouTube called ‘Location-Based Games and Place’, which you can watch below.

Many thanks to the RGS-IBG Postgraduate Forum team for designing such an innovative conference format and making it run so smoothly. It was inspiring to see a great variety of geographical research presented so creatively on Twitter. Thanks also to those who connected with me during the event by discussing our research and asking/answering questions.