What is location intelligence and which ways of knowing location, space, and place does it foreground? What’s at stake with the proliferation of location intelligence platforms and what is the fate of place? How can I intervene in the trajectory of these systems, and counter them with creative, critical, and humanistic approaches to geography, at scale?
I am seeking sources for alternative, difficult or impossible to map places that reflect more ways that people relate to geography and imbue places with meaning. Instead of making a participatory map, I want to mirror the ways in which location intelligence platforms gather massive amounts of data, but will do so by creating a corpus from a vast array of english language sources. This will allow me to work creatively and ethically with different working definitions of place – and explore the geographies latent within texts – works of fiction, wikipedia, messageboards, newspaper and magazine articles, websites more broadly. I will bring these data, the Points of Interest that I’ve altered, the corpus and resulting Places of Experience dataset that I will create from it, into an alternative Location Intelligence Platform. I am developing a few interventions that will mirror the structures of Location Intelligence products but alter them in meaningful ways. The result will be a constellation of experiments that extend from new data structures to new representational modes for data about place. I will explore other ways to interact with digital places and spatial text – which will dialog with and relate to place differently, in chat for example, or through other ubiquitous web map interactions like search, routing, or geolocation.
