Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code

We are very happy to report that a paper that that Mark, Matt, and Andrew Boulton have been working has just been accepted for publication in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

The paper is titled Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code and the abstract is below:

With the increasing prevalence of both geographic information, and the code through which it is regulated, digital augmentations of place will become increasingly important in everyday, lived geographies. Through two detailed explorations of ‘augmented realities,’ this paper provides a broad overview of not only the ways that those augmentations realities matter, but also the complex and often duplicitous manner that code and content can congeal in our experiences of augmented places. Because the re-makings of our spatial experiences and interactions are increasingly influenced through the ways in which content and code are fixed, ordered, stabilised, and contested, this paper places a focus on how power, as mediated through technological artefacts, code and content, helps to produce place. Specifically, it demonstrates there are four key ways in which power is manifested in augmented realities: two performed largely by social actors, distributed power and communication power; and two enacted primarily via software, code power and timeless power. The paper concludes by calling for redoubled attention to both the layerings of content and the duplicity and ephemerality of code in shaping the uneven and power-laden practices of representations and the experiences of place augmentations in urban places.

Please send Mark an email if you would like a pre-publication copy. We would welcome any thoughts and comments you have about the paper.

(we'll leave it to you to work out what nyancat has to do with anything in this post)

we found love in a coded space: augmented realities, bots, and code/space

"I am longing, shocking and unequal. Also imminent and square. I am lost."

These are the words of @shipadrift - a virtual floating boat that navigates the intersections between the material and virtual palimpsests that make up our being-in-the-world. If you haven't yet seen the project, we highly recommend you check out both the ship's current material/virtual location and it's travel narrative published through a Twitter account.

The way the project works is that the ship's direction and speed are calculated based on a wind speeds in London: allowing the ship to always have movement and position in material space. This is supplemented by scraping all of the augmented layers of place that exist over the ship's particular location: Wikipedia articles, personal ads, photographs, etc. The project is simply brilliant and we can't think of a better way to visualise and explain the digital augmentations of our planet.

We actually learnt about this project recently thanks to a video sent to us by Martin Dodge. The talk, by James Bridle, discusses the 'shipadrift' project, but also delves more broadly into what it means to live in co-created spaces; spaces that we share with bots; hybrid spaces that are shared between our physical presences, our imaginations, and the broader network. There are a lot of parallels here to some of the work that Mark and Matt have been doing on augmented realities, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin have been doing into code/spaces, and Stuart Geiger has been doing into the lives of bots. Bridle nicely brings all of these themes together and we definitely suggest that you check out his talk below:

The geolinguistic contours of digital content in Spain

Following up on our post about augmented realities and uneven geographies, we wanted to post a few more maps that came out of the project.

This first one compares content indexed in Spanish (Castilian) to content in Catalan. Throughout much of the Catalonian region in the Northeast coastal areas there is considerably more content in Catalan than in Spanish.

The second compares content containing the word "love" in English and Spanish. The map reveals that while the Spanish term is much more predominant overall, there are clusters of locations along the Mediterranean coast at which there are more references to the English word.

These agglomerations are centered in tourism regions of Costa Brava, Costa Blanca, and the Andalusian coastline and closer inspection reveals that these concentration of hits are tied primarily to tourism related references to hotels, restaurants and other activities that are target to non-Spanish visitors.

One key thing that this map does then is reveal how the audiencing of augmentations can be alternately directed to a range of groups: ranging from the highly local (e.g. interpersonal relationships) to the global (e.g. tourist sites).

You can read more about the methods we used and our full conclusions in our new paper: "Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies: Exploring the Geo-linguistic Contours of the Web."

Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies: Exploring the Geo-linguistic Contours of the Web

Mark and Matt have just had a paper accepted to Environment and Planning A (Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies: Exploring the Geo-linguistic Contours of the Web). The paper is concerned with the ways in which augmented inclusions and exclusions, visiblilities and invisibilities will shape the way that places become defined, imagined, and experienced.





The maps above are all taken from an earlier draft of the paper. They visualise the layers of information indexed by Google and segment the data by language in order to map some of the geo-linguistic contours of the Web. Have a glance through the paper, and let us know if you have any comments or questions. The publication date of the full paper should be some time in early 2013.

Augmented realities and uneven geographies

In the "better late than never category" we offer the presentation that Mark and I gave last September at the iCS-OII symposium. The paper version is available as well is you email me.

Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies

View more presentations from Mark Graham