About the Project
The convergence of handheld computing devices and GPS receivers makes it possible to augment any place with layers of digital information. This is place-based computing. It has the potential to radically change the way that we experience places and understand the past.
All of our research projects start from the premise that places are archives, and that by studying places it is possible to reconstruct past events. Some of this work is archival in a traditional sense, and builds on work in microhistory, the history of science and environmental history. Some is methodological, aimed at developing new techniques for extracting information from representations of places or from places themselves. Some is public history, designed to be presented to the public in the places that are being interpreted.
The Place-Based Computing initiative at The University of Western Ontario was established in 2005 to support interdisciplinary research on technologically-augmented experiences of place, and to develop new locative methods for teaching history, geography, and related disciplines. We work closely with the ![[WWW]](http://wikispot.org/wiki/eggheadbeta/img/sycamore-www.png){kind=small}
Public History program, with Jason Gilliland’s Imag(in)ing London group, and with members of the community.
Erle, Schuyler, Rich Gibson and Jo Walsh. Mapping Hacks: Tips and Tools for Electronic Cartography (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005):
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Environmental or actuarial details
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Historical and cultural information
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Community events and activities
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Micro-local commercial and public service information
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Personal/social stories and preferences
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Qualitative/quantitative psychogeography
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Games and amusements, e.g., geocaching
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Locative spam (!)
“Imagine a world in which we can move about physical places, accessing not only what is stored in our brains but also multiple layers of information that have previously been inaccessible: experiences of friends, colleagues, and complete strangers in the same space; information about who lives and works in that place, their demographic characteristics, and perhaps their political affiliations; crime statistics for the area; the history of community events, from celebrations to calamities; information about businesses in the area and their products; changes that have reshaped the natural environment over time; and much more. This is precisely the physical landscape that we will likely inhabit in 10 years.
Wireless location-aware devices, new geospatial software, global location services, and online geodata repositories are all eroding the limitations to human perception, making accessible a rich spectrum of digital information in real time and in real place. The physical landscape we move in will become ‘deep’ with vast amounts of digital information — in text, images, and other sensory forms.
Invisible layers of information that are arguably already implicitly available in the people and objects in a landscape will become visible and explicit. The relationship of physical and virtual objects will become obvious as well. We’ll be able to use a variety of devices to tap into geocoded text, images, media, and maps. Tags will link nearby objects to a universe of commentary on their history, value, safety, and meaning. Suddenly, any point in space will be able to be annotated, and those annotations aggregated. Locative annotations might include:
Right now, our interfaces to this world are clunky at best, based on heads-down interfaces in which a hiker might miss the beauty and glory of the great outdoors by being over-interested in his interface device. As these interfaces become refined, we will gain a new kind of control over what we see and hear in our environment, selectively filtering and displaying the layers of information linked to the physical environment. We’ll click floating graphic objects off and on like ‘digital Post-It notes.’ Each individual’s physical reality will become increasingly personalized.” [xxii-xxiii]
