Creating Counter Maps & Shared Geographies with Locative Media

Three months ago, I switched my PhD advisor and with it comes a new direction in my work.  My focus is still on locative media and sense of place (as with my prior research and publishing on this topic). But now I'm looking at how people are using the features of locative media (a.k.a location-based services) to define their own place, share this with others (i.e. friends or the public) and thereby shape their sense of place.

As this is a new angle on the topic, I'd love to hear people's feedback. Below is a summary of the major strands in my current work:

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Having a relationship to the places we encounter and inhabit is considered a foundational human experience (Heidegger, 1996). As we interact and learn about places, we bestow meaning on such places, forming the mental concept of a sense of place (Tuan, 1976; Relph, 1977). Scholars have examined how various factors, such as individual attitudes, memories, values, interests and aesthetic sensibility shape how individuals form a sense of place (Steele, 1981). Sense of place is more than merely perception of physical stimuli and a conception of place as a meaningful location; it can be an embodied and metaphysical experience, shaping our notions of existence in the world.

For over forty years, scholars have discussed the conditions of modern life that make establishing or maintaining a positive sense of place difficult. Two of the main threats are considered to be contemporary urban planning and architecture (Jacobs, 1992; Relph, 1976) and international and domestic migrations (Connerton, 2009). Connerton (2009) and Farham (2012) argue that a deeper knowing of a place assists in forming a sense of place, yet various forces have resulted in people either forgetting or never knowing information about places that would aid in forming sense of place.

Humans have created and used information about places since prehistory, whether in the form of crude maps drawn in the sand or cave drawings of hunting grounds, to guide their experiences and knowledge of the world (Garfield, 2012; Jacob, 2006). Yet the information about locations that are readily available has often been hegemonic (Bidwell & Winschiers-Theosphilus, 2012; Farham, 2012; Thompson, 2007). The production and distribution of geographic information has been restricted for centuries as a means to control the masses (Crampton, 2008; Harley, 2001; Monmonier, 1996). In addition, map-making has traditionally been a professional activity, dominated by an elite with specialized training and credentials and access to necessary software and data (Tulloch, 2007)

Social critics such as Debord have been critical of such hegemonic control over place information and representation, noting that officials create a false notion amongst the public that the places they encounter are void of meaning: “On this spot nothing will ever happen, and nothing ever has” (Debord, 1983, p. 177). Debord asserts that forces of power attempt to create apathy in citizens by denuding spaces of their meaning. Debord and the psychogeographic movement he founded in the 1960s have staged interventions to counter these forces (in the forms of dérives and détournements, see Debord, 1956a and Debord, 1956a). More recently, critical geography scholars have cried for more open and egalitarian access to the power to define our spaces, such as Harvey’s notion of the “the right to the city” (2008), Soja’s “spatial justice” concept (2010), or Kitchen, Linehan, O’Callaghan, and Lawton’s “public geographies” (2013).

Concurrent to hegemonic geographical information, people have continued to produce and share their own accounts and interpretations of places through various means. The advent of open-access geographic data and mapping software (such as Google Earth or OpenStreetMaps) combined with distributed access to the Internet (this suite of resources is often called the “geoweb”, see Corbett, 2013) have made it more feasible for people to create and share their own geographic information. This practice, whether conducted on a desktop computer or a mobile device, can take the form of participatory mapping (Corbett, 2013; Tulloch, 2007) or participatory geographic information systems (Dunn, 2007; Elwood, 2006; Young, 2013). Such participatory efforts can consists not only of adding locations or descriptive data to a map or GIS software, but can also apply to place information, and can take the form of narratives, personal reflections, or imagery related to a given place.

One form of participatory mapping is counter mapping. Counter mapping was inspired by Bunge’s work in the 1970s. Bunge mapped urban poverty in the United States. Scholars using counter mapping took Bunge’s social justice objectives to help marginalized groups argue for territorial or socio-political claims (Rundstrom, 2009). The method involves specialists in cartography, geographic information systems, and/or place-based narratives (e.g. anthropologists, geographers, cartographers) working with groups to define and map their places and routes and to describe their associations and relationships with these places (Rundstrom, 2009). Counter mapping has frequently been conducted to support indigenous people’s land rights claims (e.g., Cooke, 2003; Corbett, 2013; Harrison, 2011; Hodgson, 2002; Peluso, 1995). Recent studies have extended counter mapping to new groups and locales, such as minority children in ghettoized urban locations (Taylor, 2013) and conservation efforts in protected, wilderness areas (Harris, & Hazen, 2006). Taylor’s study appears to be one of the first studies to use mobile devices with GPS in the creation of counter maps.

Conceptually similar to counter maps, but with differing objectives is the concept of shared geographies. The term “shared geographies”, although not a standard term, is used in human geography studies to denote groups sharing and collectively creating information and representations of place (e.g., Barker & Pickerill, 2012; Gatrell, 2002; Taylor, 2009). The degree of sharing and openness can be seen as within a continuum from fully public to privately shared geographies. Barkhuus, Brown, Bell, Sherwood, Hall & Chalmers (2008) elaborate: “Private geographies are the mutual sense of different places that a social group share and which differentiate that group from others. The private geography allows members of a group to draw upon ‘shared in-common’ senses of different places, and what those places mean for the group”. As with Taylor’s study, Barkhuus et al. appear to be one of the first studies to examine how people are using locative technology to create shared geographies.

Geoweb technologies combined with emerging mobile, locative technology are increasingly helping people to capture and preserve a diverse range of information on place, virtually tie it to that place, and broadcast it to others. Although locative media is not without precedent amongst other media forms in this ability, recent scholarship is beginning to identify the unique aspects of locative media. The defining aspect of locative media is its ability to recognize its physical location and customize user experiences and content accordingly (Brimicombe & Li, 2009). Locative media also offers the possibility of a multiplicity of content and of ubiquity of access (Farham, 2013). Schianchi in her work with locative media (2013) identifies two of its unique qualities: 1) its ability to subvert physical laws, such as gravity and portability, and 2) its ability to subvert property laws, such as copyright, territory, and access. Farham has examined how locative media by brining the virtual and physical together for people has created a new form of embodied sense of place (2013). Despite the increasing growth in the use of mobile locative media (Zickuhr, 2012), the role of this technology may have upon our relationships to place has not been fully studied.

Locative media has been shown to provoke new interpretations and relationships with place through creative and playful interaction with place (Hjorth, 2011; Lemos, 2011; McGarrigle, 2010) as well as artistic interventions (Lodi, 2013; Schianchi, 2013). It is also increasingly being seen as a means to counter hegemonic representations (de Souza & Hjorth, 2009, Gazzard, 2011; Hjorth, 2011; Farham, 2012; Lapenta, 2011; Shirvanee, 2006).

Through the creation of shared geographies and counter maps via locative media people are able to create and share their own information and representations of their spaces in powerful and meaningful ways. Such acts may have the potential to shape a person’s relationship to their places and ultimately their sense of place.

This leads to my research questions:

1. How do people use locative media to create counter-maps and shared geographies?
2. How, and in what ways, does such use of locative media affect an individual’s sense of place?

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As I mentioned, I'd love to hear people's reaction to this topic and to get any suggestions for useful literature or groups using locative media in this way.


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References

Barker, A. J., & Pickerill, J. (2012). Radicalizing relationships to and through shared geographies: Why anarchists need to understand indigenous connections to land and place. Antipode, 44(5), 1705–1725.

Barkhuus, L., Brown, B., Bell, M., Sherwood, S., Hall, M. & Chalmers, M. (2008). From awareness to repartee: Sharing location within social groups. In Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 497–506). New York, NY: ACM.

Bidwell, N. J., & Winshiers-Theophilus, H. (2012). Extending connections between land and people digitally: Designing with rural Herero communities in Namibia. In E. Giaccardi (Ed.), Heritage and social media: Understanding heritage in a participatory culture (pp. 197–216). New York, NY: Routledge.
Brimicombe, A., & Li, C. (2009). Location-based services and geo-information engineering. Chichester, UK: Wiley.
Connerton, P. (2009). How modernity forgets. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Cooke, F. M. (2003). Maps and counter-maps: Globalised imaginings and local realities of Sarawakʼs plantation agriculture. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 34(2), 265–284.
Corbett, J. (2013). “I don’t come from anywhere”: Exploring the role of the geoweb and volunteered geographic information in rediscovering a sense of place in a dispersed aboriginal community. In D. Sui, S. Elwood, & M. Goodchild (Eds.), Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge (pp. 223–241). New York, NY: Springer.
Crampton, J. W. (2008). Will peasants map? Hyperlinks, map mashups, and the future of information. In J. Turow & L. Tsui (Eds.), The hyperlinked society: Questioning connections in the digital age (pp. 206–226). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Debord, G. (1956a). Theory of the dérive. (K. Knabb, Trans.) Situationist International Online. Retrieved from http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html
Debord, G. (1956b). User’s guide to détournement, a. (K. Knabb, Trans.) Situationist International Online. Retrieved from http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/usersguide.html
Debord, G. (1983). The society of the spectacle. Detroit, MI: Black and Red.
De Souza e Silva, A., & Hjorth, L. (2009). Playful urban spaces. Simulation & Gaming, 40(5), 602 –625.
Dunn, C. E. (2007). Participatory GIS -- a people’s GIS? Progress in Human Geography, 31(5), 616–637.
Elwood, S. (2006). Critical issues in participatory GIS: Deconstructions, reconstructions, and new research directions. Transactions in GIS, 10(5), 693–708.

Elwood, S. (2010). Geographic information science: Emerging research on the societal implications of the geospatial web. Progress in Human Geography, 34(3), 349–357.

Farman, J. (2012). Mobile interface theory: Embodied space and locative media. New York, NY: Routledge.
Garfield, S. (2012). On the map: A mind-expanding exploration of the way the world looks. New York,  NY: Penguin.
Gatrell, J. D. (2002). Policy spaces: Applying Lefebvrian politics in neo-institutional spaces. Space and Polity, 6(3), 327–342.
Gazzard, A. (2011). Location, location, location: Collecting space and place in mobile media. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 17(4), 405–417.
Harley, J. B. (2001). The new nature of maps : Essays in the history of cartography. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Harrison, R. (2011). “Counter-mapping” heritage, communities and places in Australia and the UK. In J. Schofield & R. Szymanski (Eds.), Local Heritage, Global Context: Cultural Perspectives on Sense of Place (pp. 79–98). Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Harris, L., & Hazen, H. D. (2006). Power of maps: (Counter)-mapping for conservation. ACME: An International e-Journal for Critical Geographies, 4(1), 99–130.

Harvey, D. (2008). The right to the city. New Left Review, (53), 23–40.

Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and time. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Hjorth, L. (2013).  The place of the emplaced mobile: A case study into gendered locative media practices. Mobile Media & Communication, 1(1), 110–115.

Hodgson, D. L. (2002). Dilemmas of counter-mapping community resources in Tanzania. Development and Change, 33(1), 79–100.
Jacob, C. (2006). The sovereign map. University of Chicago Press.
Jacobs, J. (1992). The death and life of great American cities. New York, NY: Vintage.

Kitchin, R., Linehan, D., O’Callaghan, C., & Lawton, P. (2013). Public geographies through social media. Dialogues in Human Geography, 3(1), 56–72.

Lapenta, F. (2011). Geomedia: On location-based media, the changing status of collective image production and the emergence of social navigation systems. Visual Studies, 26(1), 14–24.

Lemos, A. (2011). Pervasive computer games and processes of spatialization: Informational territories and mobile technologies. Canadian Journal of Communication, 36(2), 277–294.

Lodi, S. (2013). Spatial art: An eruption of the digital into the physical. Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 19(2). Retrieved from http://www.leoalmanac.org/vol19-no2-spatial-art/

McGarrigle, C. (2010). The construction of locative situations: Locative media and the Situationist International, recuperation or redux?. Digital Creativity, 21(1), 55–62.

Monmonier, M. S. (1996). How to lie with maps (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Peluso, N. L. (1995). Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Antipode, 27(4), 383–406.

Rundstrom, R. (2009). Counter-mapping. In (R. Kitchin & N. Thrift, Eds.) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Oxford, UK: Elsevier.

Relph, E.  (1976). Place and placelessness. London, UK: Pion.

Taylor, K. (2013). Counter-mapping the neighborhood on bicycles: Mobilizing youth to reimagine the city. Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 18(1-2), 65–93.

Thompson, C. (2007). Smile when you’re lying: Confessions of a rogue travel writer. Ney York, NY: Holt.

Tulloch, D. L. (2007). Many, many maps: Empowerment and online participatory mapping. First Monday, 12(2). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1620/1535

Schianchi, A. (2013). Location-based virtual interventions: transcending space through mobile augmented reality as a field for artistic creation. Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 19(2). Retrieved from http://www.leoalmanac.org/vol19-no2location-based-virtual-interventions/

Shirvanee, L. (2006). Locative viscosity: Traces of social histories in public space. Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 14(3-4). Retrieved from http://www.leoalmanac.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Locative-Viscosity-Traces-Of-Social-Histories-In-Public-Space-Mapping-The-Emerging-Urban-Landscape-Vol-14-No-3-July-2006-Leonardo-Electronic-Almanac.pdf

Soja, E. W. (2010). Seeking spatial justice. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Steele, F. (1981). The sense of place. Boston, MA: CBI Pub.

Taylor, B. (2009). “Place” as prepolitical grounds of democracy: An Appalachian case study in class conflict, forest politics, and civic networks. American Behavioral Scientist, 52(6), 826–845.

Tuan, Y. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Veronesi, F., & Gemeinboeck, P. (2009). Mapping footprints: A sonic walkthrough of landscapes and cultures. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 15(3), 359–369.

Young, J. C. (2013). The spatial politics of affect and emotion in participatory GIS. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103(4), 808–823.

Zickuhr, K. (2012). Three-quarters of smartphone owners use location-based services. Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Location-based-services.aspx

Putting Locative Technology In Its Sense of Place - Presentation

Today, I presented at IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society on my research on locative media and sense of place. 

Below is my presentation. To access my speaker notes click the gear-like icon on the bottom right.

Putting Locative Technology In Its Sense of Place

I'm presenting on my research with locative technology and our relationships to place at the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society this Saturday (June 29). Here's the highlights of my paper:

ABSTRACT:
As we interact and learn about places, we bestow meaning on such places, forming the mental concept of a sense of place. Mobile devices and location-based services (LBS) may alter our everyday relationships of place. This paper reports on an exploratory survey study conducted on the elements that comprise sense of place and the role of (LBS). It was found that sense of place arises from diverse information sources, is multimodal and individualistic. Findings also suggest LBS can improve sense of place by enhancing people’s familiarity, personal engagement, and social connection to place. Respondents also identified barriers to their use of LBS.

I. INTRODUCTION
Whether a newcomer or a long-time resident of a given place, experiencing a place in cognizant fashion results in a sense of place. Sense of place can be created anew from a first time encounter or be continuously renewed. Heidegger argues for the primacy of direct experience of the world as a way of knowing, as he states “space can only be understood by going back to the world” [1, p. 105]. This view formed an experiential basis for future place scholars, such as Relph [2], Tuan [3], and Seamon [4].

Humans have created and shared information about place since prehistoric times, often in the forms of crude maps or oral narratives [5]. As technology evolved, information about place could be more readily documented and shared more broadly through such media as books, maps, pamphlets, photographs, films, and websites. Current information and communications technology, however, is making it easier to access information about a given place while at that particular place. Although the term LBS is still relatively recent, Brimicombe and Li offer a definition of LBS noting that it delivers “data and information services where the content of those services is tailored to the current or some projected location and context of a mobile user” [6, chap. 1.1). LBS have grown in number and popularity over the last three years [7].

People are using mobile devices to learn about the places they frequent, but prior studies have not fully examined how using such technology affects people’s everyday lives and their relationships to place. This paper reports on a small-scale, survey study exploring the role of information and LBS in shaping sense of place. Four research questions were posed:

1. What is the nature of relationships people have to places?
2. How do people use information in forming a sense of place?
3. How do people use mobile devices in relation to place?
4. What is the potential of LBS to improve sense of place? 

II. LITERATURE REVIEW
To articulate humans’ relationship to their surroundings Tuan notes, “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” [3, p.6]. The scale of what this term encompasses, however, is often vague in place discourse; it can be a country or a corner of a room [3]. Cresswell [8] notes that place is a spatial unit that is perceived by an individual as bounded by unifying traits.

The aspects of a place from which meaning arise for us can be summarized as self, others, and environment [9]. Sense of place is the meanings an individual has toward a place [e.g., 2, 8, 10]. Such meaning can be comprised of personal feelings or memories, involving the sensual, aesthetic, experiential, or affective, and any associations or characterizations of place received or perceived by an individual. Sense of place arises from the physical and representational aspects of a place, such as the natural and built setting, inherent and transactional sociocultural factors, and utilitarian, affective, and hedonistic experiences. Sense of place is both a mental end-state and a process in flux changing based on one’s new place experiences, information, or perspective.

Sense of place has been studied in various disciplines and found to have numerous benefits. From a social perspective, sense of place has been found to lead to place attachment [11, 12]. Place attachment is seen as not only central to one’s identity [11] but it also assists in the formation of a sense of community [13] and aids people in caring for and protecting their places [14] of particular importance in heritage conservation and urban planning.

The importance of studying the role information and representation of place in the formation of sense of place is of particular importance to ICT practitioners and scholars. After all, to apprehend and then comprehend our world we must perceive information available about the physical world directly through our senses and indirectly through the accounts of others. Relph [2] and Tuan [3] are critical of the value of accounts, but their claims are not supported by empirical evidence. In contrast, one study of a LBS prototype found that people valued the place accounts of others and wanted to draw upon “the experiences of others rather than starting from nothing. In this way they are adding to the continuity of other peoples’ stories as well as enriching their own” [15, p.288]. Gay argues that “A system that includes social maps and annotation of space with notes allows users to leave traces in physical space that would otherwise have no record of who was present and what went on before” [16, p. 13]. Stewart, Hayward, Devlin, and Kirby [17] found people’s individual goals and profiles affected their use of geotartetted information, classifying people from those who actively want geotargetted information to those actively avoid it.

Empirical studies, however, that specifically examine how accounts impact the formation of sense of place could not be found. There are studies that demonstrate how sense of place can be transmitted or discerned through mediated accounts.[18, 19]. The work of anthropologists, such as Ryden [20], has examined how people use a variety of genres and media forms to share and interpret sense of place, but Ryden studied this at a cultural level rather than at the individual level.

Accounts and experiences of place are often transient and invisible. Emerging technology can reveal elusive yet geographically relevant information [21] and thereby may be able to improve people’s sense of place. Current LBS have a diversity of information sources, genres, and modalities as well as interactive and user-generated content features that offer the potential for deep and diverse information and experiences of and with place. In one study [22] researchers observed and interviewed LBS users and found that people virtually annotated place with their life events, fostering place connection. Locative media, through features as point-of-interest ratings and reviews and proximal and category searches, facilitate users’ ability to see, learn from, and act upon the experience and advice of others. Studies of LBS usage have found that people use it for such social navigation [23, 24].

Schwarzer, however, cautions on how LBS can be both an advantage and a disadvantage:

“Our sense of place is augmented by information wired from the World Wide Web. Part of the information comes from media conglomerates. Much of it streams at us from our social networks and online acquaintances. The information allows us to peruse unseen depths of the place we’re in. We have the opportunity to gain a better or different sense of place anywhere we travel within the network’s reach. … We approach, apprehend and adjust to the world around us by carrying another world with us. We stroll with a docent at our side, answering our every query. Everyday place is curated like museum space, the most banal streetscape brought to comparative life… [17, para. 25].”

Although Schwarzer raises concerns about the implications about how LBS may affect sense of place, there is a dearth of empirical research on the role of LBS in relation to sense of place.

III. METHOD
To investigate this research problem a web-based survey was conducted. The questionnaire included 21 questions, 6 of which were open-ended and 15 which were close-ended. Recruitment used convenience and snowball sampling. Using Dey’s method of qualitative data analysis [26], data were first coded based on categories established from literature and as emerged from the data. Categories were further refined using Dey’s method of splicing, splitting, linking, and connecting categories. The quantitative data, being predominantly nominal was analyzed to discern response rates, frequency and percentage totals.

IV. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
The findings and discussion are organized based on the four research questions.

A. Research Question 1: What Is the Nature of Relationships People Have With Places ?
When asked “Sense of place refers to the meanings and feelings people have for a place. Are there any places for which you have a strong sense of place?” 96.2% of respondents indicated they had such a place. The high response rate to this question suggests the pervasiveness of sense of place.

Respondents were instructed to check any of eight characteristics of place that “makes a place meaningful to you”. These characteristics had been identified from place literature. Table 1 shows the percentages and number of respondents who checked each characteristic.

TABLE I. CHARACTERISTICS OF PLACE PARTICIPANTS DEEMED MEANINGFUL

Characteristic	Percentage of respondents	Number of respondents
Past personal experience	79.5%	62
Physical qualities	76.9%	60
Social dimension	75.6%	59
History	65.4%	51
Familial connection	57.7%	45
Cultural significance	57.7%	45
Usefulness	53.8%	42
Spirtual connection	34.6%	27

Three out of the eight characteristics were reported by more than 75% of respondents: personal experiences that occurred in a given place (79.5%), aesthetic qualities of the place (76.9%), and social dimensions that have or continue to happen at the place (75.6%).

Participants also noted how these characteristics work together to create sense of place. When asked to “describe a place or places in which you feel a strong sense of place”, one participant connected various qualities:

“The first place that came to mind is the big flat rock behind the family cottage in Muskoka. From that rock nothing could be seen except trees, ferns, and sky. Sometimes a boat could be heard in the distance, but during the week the lake was usually pretty quiet. All sorts of pretend games were played on that rock. Secret trysts with boyfriends were held there.”

The importance of personal experience can best be demonstrated from another participant’s response to the same question:

“Another place with a strong sense to it is an ordinary intersection up along the airport strip, where I was told ‘I love you’ for the first time, in the romantic sense. The relationship the words went with is long since over, but the spot is still very dear!”

This response also illustrates that the qualities of sense of place, particularly those involving personal experience, are often unavailable to others but are nonetheless important to participants. Overall, these findings confirm that various elements comprise sense of place and that the interplay of these elements varies across individuals.

B. Research Question 2: How Do People Use Information in Forming a Sense of Place?
Several questions were asked about the information sources and processes people use to learn about places. When asked how they “learn about the features, history, or social dimensions” of a place they previously identified as meaningful, respondents reported using multiple information sources (almost half reported using two or more sources) and different types of information sources. The most frequently reported source was word of mouth (24 respondents), followed by print material (18), television and film (11), and the Internet (7). The use of a variety of information sources about place is best reflected by this answer:

“By physically being there [a forest] and feeling the ground beneath my bare feet, by feeling the warm breeze on my (mostly) bare skin. By using all my senses. The history of the place I obtained by reading tales of the first peoples of Canada, by learning the lore of the area through talking to others, and by imagining what it must have been like to have been a Native North American.”

A subsequent check-box question asked respondents “When do you consult the following sources of information when visiting a new place” and to check whether they used a source based on visit duration with options for “short visit (less than 1 day)”, “extended visit (more than 1 day)” and “never”. Social network / word of mouth, websites, and pamphlets were among the top five mediums for both short and extended visits. Consistent with place literature, many people value the information about place gathered from one’s social network. Social networks were identified as the most popular information source for short visits at 71.1% (54 respondents) and the second most popular at 78.9% (60) for extended visits.

Over 50% of respondents (37) reported using a mobile application when visiting a new place, with 40% of this total using it for short visits (28) and 30% (21) for extended visits. Mobile applications may be more popular for short visits than long visits as they are well-suited to providing information useful in daily lives such as location or contact information and may not be used as extensively for extended visits (such as vacations) due to high data roaming costs charged by mobile carriers.

When asked if “having access to information (regardless of source) while at a given location is valuable” all respondents agreed or strongly agreed. Overall, respondents can be seen to use various information sources to learn about a place, which add “layers of information” to their sense of place.

C. Research Question 3: How Do People Use Mobile Devices In Relation to Place?
When asked if they had “discovered something new and valuable about a place via their mobile device”, 62.5% (40 respondents) indicated they had. The larger the device screen used (e.g., tablet versus smartphone) increased positive responses, indicating the improved user experience of tablets may play a role.

Many respondents (86.3%) reported using their device to access at least one function in the past month. At the high end, 84.1% reported finding proximal businesses or services, reading local news (74.1%), finding nearby sites (67.7%), and reading information about their location (66.1%). The leading place-related functions used by respondents are directions and proximity searches for nearby businesses or events. Reponses such as “The location of a gas station when you are low on fuel is valuable information” or simply “It helped me get un-lost!” exemplify this functionality and its value to respondents.

As LBS applications become more commonly used, it will be interesting to see whether people will also start using other types of information that LBS can provide, such as historical and multimedia content, which received the lowest usage responses. Although “history of location” was reported by the lowest percentage of respondents, that some people were using mobile devices to seek historical and other factual place information, as reflected in the following comment:

“During a business trip, I saw a historical structure in the distance. Once I had Wifi access, I looked it up via Google Maps. Once I knew the name of the structure, finding out more information on it was easy.”

More pragmatically, some respondents are using their mobile device to find factual information about a place beyond directions, as exemplified by this comment:

“I found out recently not to use a public car park ... after dark. The Foursquare entry had a tip that car thieves were targeting the car park.”

Mobile devices are more than just information seeking devices, as they also enable the ability for users to record and share their own experiences and information about places. When asked if they had “used a mobile device to record notes, opinions, or memories of a place”, 40.6% of respondents replied that they had done so. These respondents were asked to elaborate on how this affected their place memories. Their responses fell into the following categories: improved recall (75.0%), encouraged personal reflection (20.8%), enabled sharing place experience (20.8%), and enhanced place experience (12.5%). One respondent put it simply as he/she was able to “strengthen the moment” of their place experience, while another provides more detail:

“The process of inscribing your thoughts on a place while at that place is very useful in concretising your thoughts on that place. I think the practice of reflecting on the place to compose an entry requires a thinking about that place, and an ordering of thoughts about that place that gives meaning to the place.”

These findings offer support for the ability of mobile devices to enable a person to engage individually and socially with a place. Mobile devices are thus seen to offer dimensions of place information and interaction that have the potential to affect one’s sense of place.

D. Research Question 4: What Is the Potential of LBS to Improve Sense of Place?
Of the 28 respondents who used a LBS, 72.4% answered the question “How have location-based services affected, or not affected, your sense of place”, with responses indicating LBS usage had improved their sense of place. One response describes this improvement as resulting from the easy, ubiquitous access to geographically-relevant information that LBS facilitate:

“They [LBS] have let me learn more about a place, quickly, while I am there - which has provided a greater depth of knowledge and let me ‘commune’ with interesting places more.”

Another response captures the individual and social elements of sense of place:

“Location based services have, by bringing other peoples’ social gazetteers into consideration, made a sense of place easier to achieve. The ability to explore what is around me through LBS and to not only stand in relation to those places but also to assess them through the social gazetteers left by other users does allow a sense of place to develop in even the unfamiliar, and the process of making such inscriptions in the LBS database strengthens my own sense of place...”

Four themes surfaced from responses to this question as shown in table 2 (some responses included more than one theme).

TABLE II. HOW LBS HAVE AFFECTED SENSE OF PLACE BASED ON OPEN TEXT RESPONSES

Themes related to LBS and sense of place	Percentage of respondents	Number of respondents
Improves familiarity or knowledge of place	45.4%	10
Aids social connection	38.0%	8
Improves appreciation of place	27.2%	6
Fosters sense of belonging or connection to place	19.0%	4

To meet the needs of users improvements to LBSs or mobile technology in general are needed, as less than half of respondents (47.3%) indicated they were satisfied or very satisfied with information provided by LBS. Respondents were asked “What can be done with mobile technology to improve your ability to learn about the places you encounter?”. Over 60% (47) of respondents offered suggestions, with five categories receiving the most responses: better or more content (31.9%), improved user interface and features (25.5%), improved personalization features (21.2%), greater geographic coverage of content (17.0%), and lower network carrier costs or roaming fees (14.8%). Despite barriers, the overall findings suggest that LBS play a role in sense of place and may be able to improve it.

V. CONCLUSION
This study provides groundwork for understanding the various elements that comprise sense of place and how LBS can address these. This study supports findings from place scholarship in affirming that sense of place arises is individualistic and is a continuous and active process. The survey confirmed the importance of personal experience as a valuable means to form a sense of place, as posited by place theorists. This study contributes to place scholarship by specifically identifying the role information plays in sense of place. Participants were found to draw upon a diverse range of information sources and media. Information was valued in forming a sense of place. Among participants using LBS, they indicated that it augments their current experience of place, enhances their sense of place, and improves their place attachment.

Greater understanding of the role LBS play in sense of place can assist in fostering a better understanding of user motivations and interactions. This can be used to contribute to the delivery of improved application interfaces and to the provision of more fulfilling and socially-relevant user experiences. Mobile, locative technology that captures and preserves a diverse range of information on place, virtually ties it to that place, and broadcasts it to others, can help people feel not only more informed but also more connected to their surroundings.

Aspects of locative media, such as its rich features to engage users with place, multiplicity of content, spatial awareness, and ubiquity of access have the potential to transition locative media from its initial focus on way finding to fostering deeper relationships to the everyday places we encounter. For LBS to meet the place-related needs of users, this research has identified the following recommendations for LBS apps:

• allow personal experience to be recorded privately and publicly
• offer personalization features
• consider affect
• draw upon various information source types (e.g. videos, text, photographs)
• offer different types of information (news, accounts, events)
•  ensure content is available across many locations

Despite claims that mobile technology mentally removes people from their physical world [27], this study offers evidence of the potential of LBS to positively impact people’s relationships to their places.

VI. REFERENCES

[1] M. Heidegger, Being and Time. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996.
[2] E. C. Relph, Place and Placelessness. London, UK: Pion, 1976.
[3] Y. Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
[4] D. Seamon, A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest, and Encounter. London, UK: Croom Helm, 1979.
[5] M. Corson and E. Palka, “Geotechnology, the U.S. military, and war,” in Geography and Technology, S. D. Brunn, S. L. Cutter, and J. W. Harrington, Eds. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 2004, pp. 401–427
[6] A. Brimicombe and L. Chao, Location-based Services and Geo-information Engineering. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2009.
[7] K. Zickuhr. “Three-quarters of smartphone owners use location-based services,” Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, 2012. http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Location-based-services.aspx.
[8] T. Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
[9] P. Gustafson, “Meanings of place: Everyday experience and theoretical conceptualizations,” J. Environ. Psychol., vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 5–16, March 2001.
[10] B. Jorgenson and R. Stedman, “Sense of place as an attitude: Lakeshore owners’ attitudes toward their properties,” J. Environ. Psychol., vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 233–248, September 2001.
[11] P. Morgan, “Towards a developmental theory of place attachment,” J. Environ. Psychol., vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 11–22, March 2010.
[12] K. Williamson and J. Roberts, “Developing and sustaining a sense of place: The role of social information,” Library & Info. Science Res., vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 281–287, October 2010.
[13] A. Williams, P. Kitchen, L. DeMiglio, J. Eyles, B. Newbold, and D. Streiner, “Sense of place in Hamilton, Ontario: Empirical results of a neighborhood-based survey,” Urban Geo., vol. 31, no. 7, pp. 905–931, October 2010.
[14] J. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York, NY: Vintage, 1992.
[15] J. Paay and J. Kjeldskov, “A gestalt theoretic perspective on the user experience of location-based services,” In Proc. of the 2007 Australasian Comp.-Human Interaction Conf.. Adelaide, Australia, 2007.
[16] G. Gay, Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–62, January 2009.
[17] E. J. Stewart, B. M. Hayward, P. J Devlin, and V.G. Kirby, “The ‘place’ of interpretation: A new approach to the evaluation of interpretation,” Tourism Mgmt., vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 257–266, June 1998.
[18] C. Buchanan, “Sense of place in the daily newspaper,” Aether: The J. of Media Geo., vol. 4, March 2009. http://130.166.124.2/~aether/volume_04.html.
[19] T. Rantanen, “The new sense of place in 19th-century news,” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 435–449, 2003.
[20] K. Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1993.
[21] A. Gazzard, “Location, location, location: Collecting space and place in mobile media,” Convergence: The Intl. J. of Res. into New Media Tech.,vo. 17, no. 4, pp. 405–417, 2011.
[22] L. Humphreys and T. Liao, “Mobile geotagging: Reexamining our interactions with urban space,” J. of Comp.-Mediated Comm., vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 407–423, 2011.
[23] M. Bilandzic, “A review of locative media, mobile and embodied spatial interaction,” Int. J. of Human-Comp. Studies, vol. 70, no. 1, pp. 66–71, 2012.
[24] L. Evans, “Location-based services: Transformation of the experience of space,” J. of Location Based Services, vol. 5, no. 3-4, pp. 1–19, 2011.
[25] M. Schwarzer, “Sense of place, a world of augmented reality,” Design Observer Group, June 8, 2010.
[26] Dey, Ian, Qualitative Data Analysis: A User-friendly Guide for Social Scientists. London, UK: Routledge, 1993.
[27] K. J. Gergen,The challenge of absent presence.” in J. E. Katz and  M. Aakhus, Eds., Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 227-241.

Measuring Sense of Place

I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to determine what exactly is sense of place and how one might be able to determine if technology can indeed impact it. There have been several people looking into this but often I found they were either studying something else - such as sense of community or place attachment - or had instruments that weren't transferable to other studies. Then I found a study by Suzanne Bott called appropriately enough "The development of psychometric scales to measure sense of place" that was the only suitable method I encountered to measure sense of place.

As I won't be using this research now, I thought it might be useful to share for anyone else considering such a study (and let me know if you are).

One of the most cited scholars for measuring sense of place (SOP) is Stedman; he attempted to resolve the difficulty of measuring SOP on his own (2003) and with Jorgensen (2001). Stedman proposed scales to measure related place concepts such as attitude towards a place and place satisfaction, similar to product satisfaction, as measurable proxies for SOP. This work, however, divorces studies of place from the realm of meaning and instead offers a utilitarian view of place, which is not transferable to all experiences of place.

With the goal of being able to quantify degrees of SOP, Shamai (1991) formulated a scale ranging from no SOP, knowledge of being located in a place, feeling of belonging to place, attachment to place, identification with place, involvement in preserving or shaping place, to sacrificing for place. Although Shamai’s continuum of SOP degrees is useful, his questionnaire to measure this was designed for a particular location (i.e., a religious school) and is therefore not transferable to other study sites.

To date, Bott (2000) appears to be the only work that offers a quantitative tool to measure the multiple dimensions of SOP. Through focus groups and expert panels, Bott developed 15 scales comprising 90 individual questionnaire items to measure independently the dimensions of SOP, such as sociocultural, environment, existential, aesthetic, and functional.

Bott groups her SOP scales under four overarching “domains”: physical setting, cultural, affective (Bott uses the term affective to refer to the effects a place produces, not limited to emotional responses), and functional. The table below shows the domains, scales, and items she developed and validated to measure SOP.  Each questionnaire item is measured by a seven-point Likert scale.

BOTT (2000) SENSE OF PLACE SCALE

DOMAINS AND SCALES	QUESTIONNAIRE ITEMS
Natural Setting Domain
Natural Setting Scale [5 items]	natural, sunny, has good lighting, has a good amount of trees
Built Environment Scale [3 items]	made of materials which are appropriate in color, made of materials which fit the setting, has attractive buildings
Character Scale [10 items]	clean, alive, peaceful, distinctive, harmonious, balanced, well-maintained, simple, spacious, open
Cultural Setting Domain
Inherent Sociocultural Scale [6 items]	historic, authentic, has a spirit of the people, fits within the larger context of [specific place], supports the activities of [specific place], feel a sense of history
Transactional Sociocultural Scale [7 items]	offers a sense of belonging, provides opportunities for interaction with others, offers civility, generates respect for the individual, has a distinct energy, feel a part of the community, feel a sense of belonging
Affective Individual / Personal Domain
Significance Scale [4 items]	meaningful, significant, interesting, valuable
Existential Scale [4 items]	feel a sense of connection, feel a sense of my own identity, feel a sense of attachment, feel a sense of ownership
Memory Scale [6 items]	familiar, well-known, memorable, feel a sense of connection, feel like I know it well, feel a sense of nostalgia
Aesthetic Scale [6 items]	beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, pleasing to look at, generates a positive sensory experience, feel a sense of awe, feel a sense of appreciation
Transcendental Scale [10 items]	inspirational, magical, sacred, spirit of place, feel alive, feel inspired, feel connected to higher power, feel fulfilled, feel sense of romance, feel strong emotions
Functional Individual / Personal Domain
Purposive Scale [2 items]	meets my expectations of [specific place] setting, supports my role at [specific place]
Informational Scale [6 items]	understandable, provides a sense of direction, has distinct landmarks, is easy for me to find my way around in, makes way-finding seem intuitive, provides info
Prospect Scale [4 items]	feel like there are opportunities here for me, feel like exploring, feel like I have options, feel a sense of mystery
Refuge Scale [4 items]	non-threatening, has obvious boundaries, offers shelter, feel a sense of refuge
Well-being Scale [12 items]	safe, comfortable, warm, serene, reassuring, revitalizing, feel in control, feel peaceful, feel comfortable, feel calm, feel a sense of comfort, feel serene

(table adapted from Bott, 2000, pp.57-58)

References:

Bott, S. E. (2000). The development of psychometric scales to measure sense of place (Doctoral dissertation). Colorado State U., Fort Collins, CO.

Jorgenson, B., & Stedman, R. (2001). Sense of place as an attitude: Lakeshore owners’ attitudes toward their properties. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 21(3), 233–248.

Shamai, S. (1991). Sense of place: An empirical measurement. Geoforum, 22(3), 347–358.

Stedman, R. (2002). Toward a social psychology of place. Environment and Behavior, 34(5), 561–581.

Stedman, R. (2003). Sense of place and forest science: Toward a program of quantitative research. Forest Science, 49(6), 822–829.

Study Highlights: The Role of Location-Based Services in Shaping Sense of Place

I'm presenting this paper at ASIS&T annual meeting this week.  It represents the highlights of a larger survey study I conducted last December.

ABSTRACT
The increasing ubiquity of mobile devices with positioning technology has enabled more people to access and create information where it is geographically relevant. These location-based services are growing in user adoption, yet the role of such emerging technology in our relationships to the places we encounter has not been fully examined. This paper reports on a survey study that examines how people use mobile devices in relation to place and the potential for location-based services to improve sense of place.  It was found that location-based services enhance people’s familiarity, personal engagement, and social connection to place, leading to an improved sense of place.

Keywords
Location-based services, mobile applications, locative media, geoinformatics, sense of place.

INTRODUCTION
The open and ubiquitous nature of current and emerging mobile, Internet, and geographic information technologies have enabled the widespread creation and dissemination of diverse and multimodal forms of geographically relevant information. Current mobile applications can identify a user’s location and deliver information geographically relevant to that position. This functionality is known as location-based services (LBS). Three-quarters of American smartphone users are now using location-based services (Zickuhr, 2012), such as foursquare, Google+ Local, SCVNGR, and Layar. LBS can take the form of stand-alone applications or embedded functionality in other mobile apps. LBS often enable users to access and interact with diverse sources and formats of place information, to create and share content, and to participate in geosocial networking and locative gaming.
Studies show possible societal benefits from the use of location-based services. For example, a Pew study found that 65% of survey respondents with a mobile device believe it is now easier to keep up with community information, compared to 47% for non-mobile users (Purcell et al., 2011). Yet, studies have not examined how this technology affects one’s sense of place.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Sense of place is the “meanings associated with a place” (Cresswell, 2009, p. 169). It arises from the interrelationship of self, others, and environment (Gustafson, 2001). Scholars have posited that sense of place is a fundamental human need (Relph, 1976), an essential component for feelings of belonging or attachment to the world (Stedman, 2003), and a trigger for heritage and environmental custodianship (Kaltenborn, 1997).

Relph (1976) argues that personal experience is the root of our relationship to place. Yet, accounts of others and cultural forces also shape how we interpret and value place (Lefebvre, 1991). Walker and Wehner (2009) found online information aided in the social construction of place, while Cramer, Rost, and Holmquist (2011) found similar results with LBS users. A direct connection, however, between use of LBS and sense of place has not been found in empirical research.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The study addressed two research questions:

1. How are people using mobile devices in relation to place?
2. What is the potential of location-based services to improve sense of place?

METHOD

A web-based survey using open and close-ended questions was used. Recruitment used convenience and snowball sampling, drawing upon this researcher’s network via his blogs and social networking websites. The questionnaire was open to anyone over 18 with access to a mobile device (defined in the questionnaire as a “portable computing device with network connectivity”). Seventy eight people completed the questionnaire, with participants representing a cross-section of ages, education levels, residence, and type of mobile device used. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistical analysis and thematic coding.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

Findings and discussion are organized by research question.

RQ#1 How are people using mobile devices in relation to place?

When asked if they had “discovered something new and valuable about a place via their mobile device”, 62.5% (40 respondents) indicated they had. The larger the device screen used (e.g., tablet versus smartphone) increased positive responses, indicating user experience may play a role.  

Based on a list of LBS functions provided, many respondents (86.3%) reported using at least one such function in the past month (see figure 1 for the breakdown). At the high end, 84.1% report finding proximal businesses or services, reading local news (74.1%), finding nearby sites (67.7%), and reading information about their location (66.1%).  

When asked if they had “used a mobile device to record notes, opinions, or memories of a place”, 40.6% of respondents replied that they had done so. These respondents were asked to elaborate on how this affected their relationship to a place. Their responses fell into the following categories: improved recall (75.0%), encouraged personal reflection (20.8%), enabled sharing of place experiences (20.8%), and augmented place experience (12.5%).

These place-related functionalities that mobile devices enabled were seen to work with other elements, such as personal experience, reflection, and social elements that have been found to foster a sense of place.

RQ#2: What is the potential of location-based services to improve sense of place?

Of 28 respondents who indicated they had a stand-alone location-based service application installed on their mobile device, 72.4% answered the question “How have location-based services affected, or not affected, your sense of place”, with responses that were interpreted as improving their sense of place.

One response exemplifies the improved place familiarity resulting from easy, ubiquitous access to geographically-relevant information:

"They have let me learn more about a place, quickly, while I am there - which has provided a greater depth of knowledge and let me ‘commune’ with interesting places more."

Another response captures the individual and social elements of sense of place:

"Location based services have, by bringing other peoples’ social gazetteers into consideration, made a sense of place easier to achieve. The ability to explore what is around me through LBS and to not only stand in relation to those places but also to assess them through the social gazetteers left by other users does allow a sense of place to develop in even the unfamiliar, and the process of making such inscriptions in the LBS database strengthens my own sense of place..."

Of those who provided details (21 of 78), the responses were categorized into themes related to sense of place, as listed in table one (responses can be grouped in more than one category).


These findings indicate that LBS can improve one’s sense of place.

CONCLUSION
This study provides groundwork for establishing the role location-based services play in fostering sense of place. Respondents reported using LBS to find and share geotargetted place information, which increased their place familiarity and personal and social connections to place – which are components of sense of place (Gustafson, 2001). Respondents using LBS indicated it improved their place appreciation, fostered a sense of belonging, and improved their sense of place.
LBS are rapidly evolving as new features and innovations continue. Along with this, the ability to deliver geographically relevant information increases. Improved understanding of user patterns and outcomes arising from the use of LBS can provide guidance for developing applications to better meet user needs and to foster individual and societal benefits.


REFERENCES
Cramer, H., Rost, M., & Holmquist, L. E. (2011). Performing a check-in:
Emerging practices, norms and “conflicts” in location-sharing using foursquare. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (pp. 57–66). New York: ACM.

Cresswell, T. (2004). Place: A short introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Gustafson, P. (2001). Meanings of place: Everyday experience and theoretical conceptualizations. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 21(1), 5–16.

Kaltenborn, B. P. (1997). Nature of place attachment: A study among recreation homeowners in Southern Norway. Leisure Sciences, 19(3), 175–189.

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Purcell, K., Raine, L., Rosenstiel, T., & Mitchell, A. (2011). How mobile devices are changing community information environments. Retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Local-mobile-news.aspx

Relph, E. C. (1976). Place and placelessness. London, UK: Pion.

Stedman, R. (2003). Sense of place and forest science: Toward a program of quantitative research. Forest Science, 49(6), 822–829.

Walker, D., & Wehner, P. (2009). Practicing place: Collective experience and
difference in an urban online forum. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 46(1), 1–16. Silver Spring, MD: ASIS&T.

Zickuhr, K. (2012). Three-quarters of smartphone owners use location-based services. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Location-based-services.aspx

Sense of Place & Location-Based Services - Survey Summary

This past December, I designed a survey as part of my coursework for a PhD in Information at University at Toronto. As promised, I'm sharing my early results of the survey.

The survey sought to uncover foundational knowledge about how people form a sense of place (defined as the feelings and meanings attributed to place), the role of information in this process, and the potential of location-based services (LBS - defined as mobile applications or sites that deliver content based on a user's location). As location-based services are still an emerging technology, this subject has not been sufficiently addressed by academia or industry.

I'm still in the process of compiling and writing up the results, but here is a high-level summary of the findings grouped by research questions.

78 people completed the survey, with participants representing a cross-section of ages, education levels, and residences. 86% have a mobile device, with smartphones the most popular (68%) followed by GPS navigation device (31%), tablet (22%), and netbook (18%). Participants can be described as frequent users as over 80% (53 participants) indicated they used their device at least once a day.

1) What is the nature of relationships people have to places they encounter?

• 96% of participants indicating there was a place in which they associated strong feelings or meaning.
• When asked what place characteristics are meaningful, past personal experiences, physical qualities of place, and social dimensions received the strongest support with all over 75%.
• These findings confirmed phenomenologist place theorists, who believe that a relationship to place is a foundational experience in human existence and individual experience is the paramount way we process place.
• The factual elements of a place, its history and role in culture, were selected by at least half of respondents, the lack of stronger support for the these qualities was surprising as LBS can offer unique functionality to deliver this information (perhaps leading LBS have yet to effectively tap this).
• When describing a place where participants felt a "strong sense of place" in an open-ended question, 58 participants recounted experiences revealing personal experiences tied to place - a good example of this is: "Another place with a strong sense to it is an ordinary intersection... where I was told 'I love you' for the first time, in the romantic sense...the spot is still very dear!".
• Often accounts such as this reveal facets of a place hidden to others but are nonetheless significant - through LBS these types of accounts can now be made more visible.
• Descriptions of meaningful places often (67% of respondents to this question) mention emotions tied a place. Top mentioned emotions are nostalgia (fond remembrance), contentment, and excitement.

2) How are people currently using information in forming a sense of place?

• All participants agreed that access to information while at a given location is valuable.
• When asked to describe how they come to know of a specific place, experience was echoed here, with 50 participants indicating this was a primary information source.
• Personal experience was often described as an initial source of learning about a place, but was then followed by consulting various other information sources to learn more about place.
• Approximately half of respondents using two or more sources of information when learning about the place.
• When asked specifically the information sources participants use when visiting a new place for either a short (less than 1 day) or extended visit, the top five sources are (in descending order): Short visit - social network/word of mouth, website, pamphlets, mobile application, plaques. Extended visit: website, social network/word of mouth, print book, pamphlets, video or tv program.
• People are more apt to use an information source for extended visits than for short visits with the exception of mobile applications and plaques.
• In general, the more a visit demands of a person the more apt participants are to invest the time to consult a greater number of sources and more in-depth sources.

3) How, if at all, have mobile devices affected sense of place?

• The majority of participants with a mobile device are using it, in relation to place, to find location, directions or contact information.
• There is strong indication that participants are currently using mobiles to seek out facts about place beyond directions. This behaviour can be seen in the following comment: "I found out recently not to use a public car park ... after dark. The Foursquare entry had a tip that car thieves were targeting the car park".
• The ability to use mobile devices to record or share place was described by some participants as changing their experience of the place, as illustrated by this comment: "The process of inscribing your thoughts on a place while at that place is very useful in concretising your thoughts on that place. I think the practice of reflecting on the place to compose an entry requires a thinking about that place, and an ordering of thoughts about that place that gives meaning to the place (whether good or bad) and which in turn improves the memory one has of that place."
• Participants also expressed comments that they are experiencing the physical and digital worlds simultaneously, along the lines of "hybrid space" as discussed in academic litearature, this can be seen by this comment: "I pulled up a mobile app the other day when I took my children to a museum, so that I could supplement the information at the museum with information from the mobile app."
• The larger the device screen the more apt participants are to find something useful.
• The type of mobile device used does not have a strong association with usage of geotargetted information seeking via mobile device, the creation of place-based user generated content, or the likelihood to use a LBS.

4) What is the potential of location-based services to improve sense of place?

• Participants were not big users of LBS applications - of the people with a mobile device less than half have installed one of the most popular LBSs.
• The most installed used mobile applications with LBS functionality used by participants were Foursquare at 23%, Google 23%, and Facebook at 22%.
• All three of these, with the exception of Google’s Places, predominantly revolve around geo-social networking. Although place-based information can be found in the form of "tips" left by friends or made public, the core functionality of these leading apps are tracking the whereabouts of one’s social network.
• Of the participants using LBS, they expressed appreciation for the ability for the applications to enhance their sense of place by learning more about a place, as typified by these comments: "I think they have affected how much I can find out about a place and provides access to types of information about a place that I wouldn't otherwise have access to - provides richer dimensions to knowing about a place" and "Location based services have, by bringing other peoples social gazetteers into consideration, made a sense of place easier to achieve."
• LBSs were also mentioned by participants as improving their attachment to place.

5) What could be done with mobile technology to improve sense of place?

• To meet the needs of users, however, there improvements to LBS or mobile technology in general are need. Over 60% of participants offered suggestions.
• The top five suggestions were:  better content (32% support) , new functionality (26%), personalization features (21%), user experience improved (21%), and content available in more locations (17%).

Final thoughts

As one considers the possible implications for location-based services accessed via a mobile device to affect sense of place, the current iterations of technology may not reflect the qualities of future versions. The LBS market is rapidly evolving and new features and innovations as well as improvements to existing features will undoubtedly continue. Ideally, I would like my research as it continues to be able to inform future developments in this area.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this survey!

I held a random draw for an iTunes giftcard and a participant from Vancouver was chosen.

I'll revise and enhance these findings as I continue my data analysis. But I'd love to hear any thoughts below on these early results.

The Role of Geotargetted Information Via Mobile Devices in Shaping Sense of Place

Moving to the downtown core of a large city from my semi-suburban hometown, I felt impressed by - yet detached from - my urban surroundings. I enjoyed the heterogeneity of the architecture and historical roots of my new city and also appreciated the diversity of civic and citizen cultural locations – so unlike my hometown. Although I had visited the city before moving there and was familiar with the prominent buildings and main streets, I lacked a sense of the place. As a newcomer, I did not have the personal contacts to receive the insider knowledge from my neighbours.

The layers of meaning implicit in a given place include the social, historical, political, and personal. An example of these dimensions can be seen by looking at Toronto Street in downtown Toronto. It is easy to miss Toronto Street as it runs only one block, but it used to be a main thoroughfare. Today, Toronto Street is populated by a handful of generic, low and medium rise office towers. What is not immediately apparent is that this street is where Conrad Black destroyed evidence, that it has a restaurant with amazing paninis, that there is a hidden parkette providing an oasis of rose bushes and fountains, that falcons have been reintroduced nearby and often swoop and prey overhead, or that it is the former site of public executions, including leaders of the Upper Canada Rebellion.

Until recently one would not have been easily able to tap into that diversity of information instantly and on the spot. To learn the above information about Toronto Street (also the site of my former workplace) and the other new places I regularly traversed, I consulted various information sources, such as periodicals, books, and walking tours. Eventually, I got to know my new city well. Not only did I develop a strong sense of the civic and social history of the place, I also developed personal relationships to the places I frequented as my life experiences grew.

Sense of place is foundational, as it not only aids individuals in developing attachments to their surroundings, but it also contributes to the formation of personal identity. It is helpful at this point to note the geographic distinction between space, the physical terrain and features of Earth - and place, the meaning humans ascribe to space. Differing from spatial cognition with a psychological focus on our perceptions of space and way-finding, scholars of sense of place often consider phenomenological aspects. Drawing upon the philosophers Husserl and Heidegger, sense of place can be defined as how an individual conceives of space and ascribes meaning to it. Having a sense of place is seen as a fundamental component of human identity from fostering community to shaping our mindful existence.

Geographic technologies such as global positioning devices and geographic information systems have introduced powerful abilities to analyze and visualize space and place. Recent market and technological developments have now given citizens access to powerful geographic tools. The convergence of distributed network access offered by the Internet, growing ubiquity of mobile devices, and open geographic information systems (such as Google Maps), have propelled increasing user functionality for location-based applications. Place is no longer a back-drop for information seeking, creation, and sharing as current mobile applications can customize information based on a user's geographic position.

Information objects from fiction to non-fiction are rich with geographic references whether as subject, setting, or - in all cases - the location of the publication or production. Due to a lack of widespread georeferencing of information sources in libraries, on the Internet, or elsewhere, my search strategies were restricted to what turned up with a key word and category search. The novels of Margaret Atwood, for example, that refer to my neighborhood never turned up in a search. Ontario's public libraries are increasingly offering local historical information in digital format, such as the Ontario Time Machine and Knowledge Ontario's OurOntario.ca projects, yet rarely are such projects georeferenced, let alone optimized for viewing on a mobile device. Although I now feel a deep sense of place, it was a delayed and haphazard process that resulted in years where I felt detached from place.

With the growing ubiquity of mobile location-based applications, I was struck by the question of whether this technology could help foster a sense of place. Although numerous human geographers have grappled with the relational, cultural, and perceptual aspects of place, few scholars appear to have examined the role of information in the development of an individual's sense of a place. Moreover, the specific nature and impact of on-the-spot geographically relevant information appears to have not been adequately examined. Although my research is still in the formation stage, I hope in my doctoral research to explore how mobile location-based information systems affect one's sense of place. Over the months as I explore this research topic, I plan to blog about my findings and the nature of sense of place and geotargetted information.

Geo-Terminology

The topic of location-aware mobile applications are certainly a growing area. Whether an application used more for fun and reviews such as Foursquare or to find nearby businesses such as the Yellow Pages app, I believe this type of technology will become increasingly ubiquitous and embedded in an increasing number of applications and online services.

My research has been examine how these applications function and are constructed. I've encountered a lot of jargon and key terms to the area that I find it useful to clear up. So I spent some time on Wikipedia (an invaluable source).

So here are a few terms that comprise or are a form of a mobile location-aware application. All definitions are for the most part from Wikipedia, unless otherwise noted. My comments are in curly parentheses {}.

Device Level

- Context awareness - "computers can both sense, and react based on their environment" {e.g. time of day, light level, noise level, location hence "location awareness}

- Geolocation - "identification of the real-world geographic location of an object, such as a cell phone or an Internet-connected computer terminal. Geolocation may refer to the practice of assessing the location, or to the actual assessed location"

Application Level

- Location-based service (LBS) - "information or entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device"

- Locative media - "media of communication functionally bound to a location. Locative media are digital media applied to real places and thus triggering real social interactions.... Many locative media projects have a social, critical or personal (memory) background"

- Local search - " specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings. Typical local search queries include not only information about 'what' the site visitor is searching for (such as keywords, a business category, or the name of a consumer product) but also 'where' information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or geographic coordinates"

- Geotargeting - "delivering different content {e.g. advertising} to that visitor based on his or her location"

- Augmented reality (AR) - "live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics" {and increasingly text-based data are being considered AR too}

User Level

- Geosocial networking - "social networking in which geographic services and capabilities such as geocoding and geotagging are used to enable additional social dynamics" {e.g. Foursquare}

- Geographic information retrieval (GIR) - "augmentation of information retrieval with geographic metadata. Information retrieval generally views documents as a collection or `bag' of words. In contrast Geographic Information Retrieval requires a small amount of semantic data to be present (namely a location or geographic feature associated with a document)"

- Geographic relevance - "relevance denotes how well a retrieved document or set of documents meets the information need of the user" {in geographic terms, relevance most often would relate to proximity of the document/object to the user, but other forms would be temporal proximity (travel time) and the visibility of desired resource}

- Geofence - "virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. A geo-fence could be dynamically generated - as in a radius around a store or point location.... When the location-aware device of a location-based service (LBS) user enters or exits a geo-fence, the device receives a generated notification" {this could be used to block users from accessing user-generated or non-sanctioned georeferenced information about that location/business}

- Geomessaging - not in Wikipedia but here's my take - user messages (either delivered via email, SMS, or application-based) to friends or themselves georeferenced to a specific space that can only be received when at that designated space

Data Level

- Hyperlocal - "Oriented around a well defined, community scale area with primary focus being directed towards the concerns of its residents.... Hyperlocal content, often referred to as hyperlocal news, is characterized by three major elements. First, it refers to entities and events that are located within a well defined, community scale area. Secondly, it is intended primarily for consumption by residents of that area. Thirdly, it is created by a resident of the location"

- Georeferencing - "establishing {an object or document} location in terms of map projections or coordinate systems"

- Geospatial metadata - "metadata that is applicable to objects that have an explicit or implicit geographic extent, in other words, are associated with some position on the surface of the globe"

- Geocoding - "finding associated geographic coordinates (often expressed as latitude and longitude) from other geographic data, such as street addresses, or zip codes (postal codes)"

- Geotagging - "adding geographical identification metadata to various media" {implies user-generated tags & folksonomies, per Flickr}

- Geoparsing - "assigning geographic identifiers (e.g., codes or geographic coordinates expressed as latitude-longitude) to textual words and phrases that occur in unstructured content, such as "twenty miles north east of Jalalabad".... Two primary uses of the geographic coordinates derived from unstructured content are to plot portions of the content on maps and to search the content using a map as a filter. Geoparsing goes beyond geocoding. Geocoding analyzes unambiguous structured location references, such as postal addresses and rigorously formatted numerical coordinates. Geoparsing handles ambiguous references in unstructured discourse"

- ISO 19115 - "standards for Geospatial metadata. ISO 19115 defines how to describe geographical information and associated services, including contents, spatial-temporal purchases, data quality, access and rights to use."

- GeoRSS - Wikipedia's definition was lacking, so I went to the GeoRSS website for this: "As RSS and Atom become more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds."

- Keyhole Markup Language (KML) - "XML schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within Internet-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers"

System Level

- Geographic information system (GIS) - "any system that captures, stores, analyzes, manages, and presents data that are linked to location(s)"

- Global positioning system (GPS) - "space-based global navigation satellite system that provides reliable location and time information in all weather and at all times and anywhere on or near the Earth when and where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites"

- Local positioning system - "Unlike GPS or other global navigation satellite systems, which are positioning systems with a global coverage, local positioning systems don't use technology that has global coverage; they use local technology or technology that has local coverage. Examples of this local technology include cellular base stations, Wi-Fi access points, and broadcast towers"

- Gazetteer - "geographical dictionary or directory, an important reference for information about places and place names, used in conjunction with a map or a full atlas"

- Geo-block - Wikipedia doesn't have this term, but Michael Geist covers the topic well in his article Geo-Blocking Sites a Business Rather Than Legal Issue. Essentially, as it applies to the Internet, a geo-block identifies a user's IP address and restricts access to content if the user is not in a pre-approved zone. In contrast, geo-authentication can allow a user entry into an online system or site based on their IP location.

- Location-based advertising {similar to proximity marketing} - "advertising that uses location-tracking technology in mobile networks to target consumers with location-specific advertising on their mobile devices.

Finally two good parting concepts:

- Space vs. place - "Geographic space is the space that encircles the planet, through which biological life moves. It is differentiated from 'outer space" and 'inner space' (inside the mind). One definition of place, proposed by Tuan, is that a place comes into existence when humans give meaning to a part of the larger, undifferentiated space. Any time a location is identified or given a name, it is separated from the undefined space that surrounds it. Some places, however, have been given stronger meanings, names or definitions by society than others. These are the places that are said to have a strong 'Sense of Place'"

Geospatial Web or Geoweb - "merging of geographical (location-based) information with the abstract information that currently dominates the Internet. This would create an environment where one could search for things based on location instead of by keyword only – e.g. 'What is Here?...The geoweb also promises to make geographical information much more ubiquitous, opening geoinformation up to the mass market."