Attend Our Mobile Cultural Mapping Workshop

Mobile devices get criticized for distracting us from our world. Yet, I've found that mobile media - in the form of location-aware technologies and user-generated content - is growing increasingly sophisticated thereby enabling people to use their mobiles in various ways to enrich their relationship to their places.

Mobile devices can be used to record, geolocate, and share experiences and feelings about a place. They can also be used to access and benefit from reading another person's account of a place in the location that it applies to.

I have enjoyed exploring this topic and continue to research locative media.

However, I don't have a lot of experience in creating my own locative media content (aside from reviews via Foursquare or geotagged photos on Instagram). Last year, I was able to attend and help with a workshop at Mobile HCI conference that taught me the tools and methods to create my own locative stories and artworks.

The workshop was developed by Dr. Martha Ladly, a professor from OCAD University in Toronto. Professor Ladly led this workshop before in Buenos Aires and Florence and she will offer it this August at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Vancouver, BC.

This year, I am helping lead the workshop as well. Our workshop called People, Places & Things: A Mobile Cultural Mapping Workshop, is a day-long event on Saturday, August 15, 2015.

The workshop is held at the downtown campus of Simon Fraser University. From there, we'll take our mobile devices and explore the area including the Woodward redevelopment project.  It will be a fun, collaborative, and informative day spent experiencing local culture and history, creating digital art and narratives, and adding it all to mobile maps.

Participants will learn how to annotate their places and geolocate their stories using open source mapping tools, and working with their data inside the Google Earth toolkit.

If you’re interested in attending:

1. Visit our workshop website
2. Register for the workshop at ISEA (You can register for just our workshop or the entire conference.)

Please join us in Vancouver!