RAM has co-convened the PLATIAL'21 symposium
The 3rd International Symposium on Platial Information Science (PLATIAL'21) concluded on Friday 17 December. This event, a blend of conference and workshop, is the first and so far only international forum to discuss research on representations of "place", understood as mental concepts of meaningful locations, in information structures. With René Westerholt as a founding member of the event, our lab is significantly involved in the organisation of the symposium. This year, in light of the COVID pandemic, the event was held online, which provided a great opportunity to gather contributions and participants from all over the world. In total, more than 50 people from across all imaginable time zones attended the event, which included two keynote lectures, three workshops, and ten presentations.
The keynote lectures were delivered by Peter-Paul Verbeek (University of Twente, NL) and Bill Palmer (University of Newcastle, AU). Peter-Paul Verbeek offered a philosophical perspective on the interaction of place and technology. He focused on the mediating role of technology in helping us to gain a better understanding of place. The main part of the talk focused on case studies including smart city technologies, earth observation technologies, and climate engineering technologies as examples of technologies that not only mediate place but also act in normative ways embedded in cultural frameworks. Bill Palmer offered a linguistic account of place. He shed light on the complex interplay of culture, perception, group behaviour, and not least linguistic features, through which notions of place emerge that relate to the mental model of the physical world in our minds. Both lectures did an excellent job of broadening the perspective of all attendees and were thus crucial to the success of the event.
The three workshops all covered relevant and current topics around platial information. The first workshop was organised by Ekaterina Egorova (University of Twente, NL), Junghwan Kim (Harvard University, US), Grant McKenzie (McGill University, CA), Martin Tomko (University of Melbourne, AU), and Hongyu Zhang (McGill University, CA). Place-based information is ultimately always about people, in one way or another. The organisers therefore considered the issue of ethics in place-based research. Inspired by a series of lightning talks, workshop participants discussed a variety of topics, and a report summarising the results will follow in the final proceedings. The second workshop, organised by Thora Tenbrink (Bangor University, UK), focused on places of climate change. The latter will have (and in some places already has) a profound impact on our lives, including how we perceive, shape, and interact with places. A lively discussion developed in which a variety of topics were addressed, including methodological, but also human-geographical and linguistic aspects. A third workshop on streetscape modelling was offered by Tessio Novack, Carlos Cámara-Menoyo, James Tripp, and Lichuan Xiang (all University of Warwick, UK). The main theme here was the intersection of computer vision, psychological research, and urban science to gain a deeper understanding of how we conceptualise streetscapes, that is, the visual appearance of a street.
The papers presented covered a wide spectrum, from the visualisation of places to linguistic studies, to urban morphology. Authors and titles as well as links to all papers are given below. Most of the talks were also recorded and are available on YouTube.
Playlist of all videos:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMKVJ8XOixySVk0ZYi-bxpSTMBET_8_YC
Papers:
T Kosacz, M Gula, A Poplin, T Tobin, and F Nourin: Mapping Unsafe Places and Emotions: Study of Ames, Iowa, pp. 5–10. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5767174.
A Poplin: Characteristics of Evocative Places and Emotions Felt at These Places: A Multi-Cultural Comparison, pp. 11–16. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5767176.
J Richardson, and K Stock: My Favourite Place – Exploring Reasons For Place Preference, pp. 17–23. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5767178.
FB Mocnik, and L Kühl: (Un)Represented Places – A Case Study of Two Sports Venues in Gelsenkirchen and Dortmund, pp. 25–30. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5767180.
C Werner, and T Schwarze: From “Hood” to Good – Dealing with Stigmatizing Spatial Representations in Everyday Life, pp. 31–34. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5767182.
C Dolma: Reclaiming Place Through Marginalized Narratives: A Critical Geography and Humanistic Approach to the Cartographic Visualization of Beyoğlu, Istanbul, pp. 35–40. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5767184.
M Glebova: Visualising Fuzzy Boundaries of City Neighbourhoods, pp. 41–47. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5767186.
C Caton, G Pergola, T Novack, and Y He: Evaluating Public Consultation in Urban Planning via Neural Language Models and Topic Modelling, pp. 49–54. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5767188.
G McKenzie: Leveraging Place Reviews to Identify the Effects of COVID-19 on Canadian Tourism, pp. 55–60. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5767190.
L Slivinskaya, and R Westerholt: On the Integration of Place and Urban Morphology, pp. 61–66. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5767192.