Representation Of Place Research Articles

Gender in the Archive: The Dialogic Potential of Public Memory in the Outtakes from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah

The original version of the film Shoah had an enormous impact on the revival of Holocaust memory. However, women appeared only a few times over the course of those nine long hours. Even though Lanzmann’s film achieved complexity in its representation of places, it failed to equally represent the experiences of both women and men, which is a disservice to all survivors. In 2016, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) released over 220 hours of additional outtake footage from Shoah, never seen by the public. The outtakes reveal longer interviews with women, and these missing voices shed light on women’s experiences during the Holocaust in more detail. I argue that the “outtakes” of this film can be used by audiences to deconstruct gender “neutralities” around testimony to reimagine public memory narratives and spaces about the Holocaust as highly gendered. In the “rhetorical process of gendering” in public memory, so-called “neutral” public memory narratives can be challenged by newly discovered artifacts like the outtakes. Though Shoah had elements of ambiguity, there was no way to challenge its strict binary in gender representation— until now. This active audience engagement with Holocaust artifacts, what I call performative memorialization, marks a kairotic force in Holocaust memorialization; the past collapses into the present to elicit a dialogic of active audience participation.

Applying A/r/tography as a creative community resilience strategy in response to the climate emergency

ABSTRACT This paper connects arts education creative practice and the rise of climate emergency discourse with community resilience policymaking. We apply a creative-relational approach informed by the principles of a/r/tography to position community stories as central to place based transformation. Through our Guattari-inspired conceptual model, we apply the a/r/tographic method to critically explore its suitability for identifying and mapping hidden community stories — traces of a new ecosophy — as a local resilience response. Our research took place in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, as part of a creative programme commissioned to address inequalities through the arts. We entered into artistic dialogue with community creative practices that occurred at two ecological sites, creating reflective textual and visual artworks to produce alternative representations of place that challenge dominant narratives within local resilience policymaking. These mutual creative engagements informed our findings while remaining within their artistic context rather than reduced to categorised themes. This work offers a new local resilience strategy to strengthen community representation of their places.

Crossed by the border: children’s lived experiences with flooding in an urbanized transborder watershed

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the differential effect of the US-Mexico border on the lived experience of children exposed to flooding risk in an urbanized transborder watershed. The central argument is that this geopolitical border is an institution generative of social and spatial processes that create and thrive on differences and expose children on both sides of the border to high but unequal hazard levels. We pose that children’s bifurcated experiences with rain evince the border’s structuring power as a supra institution producing a socio-spatial regime that enables environmental inequities producing disparate representations of place. Understanding children’s lived experiences is critical to reducing their vulnerability in a highly integrated cross-border urbanization. Framed as a case study based on qualitative data obtained through narratives and visual elicitation techniques, the analysis reveals children’s experiences with flooding and associated hazards that have not been exposed in prior border research and have important implications for integrated disaster management, environmental justice, and resilience in border regions and cities.

A ventromedial visual cortical ‘Where’ stream to the human hippocampus for spatial scenes revealed with magnetoencephalography

The primate including the human hippocampus implicated in episodic memory and navigation represents a spatial view, very different from the place representations in rodents. To understand this system in humans, and the computations performed, the pathway for this spatial view information to reach the hippocampus was analysed in humans. Whole-brain effective connectivity was measured with magnetoencephalography between 30 visual cortical regions and 150 other cortical regions using the HCP-MMP1 atlas in 21 participants while performing a 0-back scene memory task. In a ventromedial visual stream, V1–V4 connect to the ProStriate region where the retrosplenial scene area is located. The ProStriate region has connectivity to ventromedial visual regions VMV1–3 and VVC. These ventromedial regions connect to the medial parahippocampal region PHA1–3, which, with the VMV regions, include the parahippocampal scene area. The medial parahippocampal regions have effective connectivity to the entorhinal cortex, perirhinal cortex, and hippocampus. In contrast, when viewing faces, the effective connectivity was more through a ventrolateral visual cortical stream via the fusiform face cortex to the inferior temporal visual cortex regions TE2p and TE2a. A ventromedial visual cortical ‘Where’ stream to the hippocampus for spatial scenes was supported by diffusion topography in 171 HCP participants at 7 T.

How Does Contemporary YA Literature Represent Rural People and Places?

This article presents a critical content analysis of representations of rural people and places in contemporary, middle grades and young adult novels. Interrogating representations is vital for implementing critical rural place pedagogies. Findings indicate this award-winning text set included diverse representations of racial, religious, and sexual identities. Characters often felt a sense of place-based belonging and identity but also experienced tensions of feeling stuck. Rural places were frequently depicted as places of despair and pervasive poverty, with a lack of middle or upper-middle income representations. Implications for teacher education are presented with suggestions for critical place pedagogies and developing counternarratives that convey the diversity of rural people and places.

Analysis of LGBTQ+ Representation in Indian Graphic Novels: A Case Study of Kari by Amruta Patil

The past decade has seen the Indian graphic novel undergo a transformation, turning from a niche market into a vibrant and diverse form of storytelling. The study aims to analyze LGBTQ+ representation in Kari and place it in the overall phenomenon of Indian graphic novels. The methodology included the major theoretical concepts used to analyze the graphic novel and a blend of them: queer theory – “which involves views on this construction by examining the normalization of sexuality”; thematic analysis – a “means of conceptually organizing and structuring the narrative data obtained through interviews. It involves stripping away the details and unique aspects of the text of its read-down meaning”; and analysis of author’s interviews and reviews. The study attempts to summarize findings into gender, sexuality, and sexuality in the Indian context. The paper is an understanding of Indian culture and the changing discourse around LGBTQ+ rights and representation. The novel gives a voice to a narrative that has long been silent – the life of a lesbian woman in a conservative society – by ending the invisibility that surrounds their lives through in a traditional poetic narrative.

Not Tourism Worldmaking: A Critical Dialogue with Hollinshead and Vellah on Post-Covid-19 Sensible Entanglements

Hollinshead proclaimed tourism worldmaking as the creative/imaginative and often false/faux processes that management agencies and mediating bodies use to favor particular representations of places and people. While this remains valid at an organizational level, the COVID-19 pandemic has radically (and maybe also hopefully) changed the very regimes of sensory apprehension on which tourism is based, thus also suggesting that we rethink the worldmaking aspects of its postindustrial creation (rather than production and consumption chains). Considering some recent discussions on what may happen to tourism after the end of the pandemic I claim that: 1) we should begin by reassessing the realm of the sensible, 2) talk more about “travel worldmaking”, and 3) reconsider the centrality of the traveler’s emotional work during world travels. The thesis develops at the intersection of the “must” (urgency to sustain), the “ought” (call to respect), and the “desire” (drive to enjoy). It calls for a reassessment of worldmaking agency as a structured form of action, which gestures towards a durable change in sensible entanglements between humans and the world. I engage in a critical collegial dialogue with Hollinshead and Vellah’s thesis that tourism as a postcolonial or postindustrial moment per se contributes to postidentity. Instead, I argue that after the COVID-19 event (among other viral worldmaking events threatening to eliminate humanity), world travelers resort to what is deemed accessible through their sensory capabilities within structured conditions. Tourism is thus also reimagined at a sensible level separately from the organizational/institutional processes that Hollinshead and Vellah placed center stage in their thesis.

Representing Rural: A Critical Content Analysis of Contemporary Middle Grade Novels Set in Rural Places

Children’s literature contains shared meanings that not only reflect societal norms, but also reinstate and reconstitute societal norms. This study used critical content analysis methods grounded in place theory to analyze the textual constructions of rurality in 52 contemporary, middle grade, realistic fiction novels set in US rural places. Findings revealed five salient themes, three of which are discussed in this article: systems work to keep rural people in poverty; rural people have deep connections to place; and rural people have diverse, intersectional identities. While some middle grade books in the sample move toward challenging stereotypes of rural places as monolithic (e.g., White-majority, socially conservative) by including nuanced portrayals of some characters of color, LGBTQ+ characters, and characters with disabilities, others rely on simplistic and otherwise problematic representations, using familiar tropes about rural people that suggest racial and cultural homogeneity privileging Whiteness and making invisible BIPOC in rural communities. Given the powerful impact of stories on identity formation and sensemaking, this study analyzes textual representations of rural people and places in books for middle grade readers.

From hearing to seeing: Linking auditory and visual place perceptions with soundscape-to-image generative artificial intelligence

People experience the world through multiple senses simultaneously, contributing to our sense of place. Prior quantitative geography studies have mostly emphasized human visual perceptions, neglecting human auditory perceptions at place due to the challenges in characterizing the acoustic environment vividly. Also, few studies have synthesized the two-dimensional (auditory and visual) perceptions in understanding human sense of place. To bridge these gaps, we propose a Soundscape-to-Image Diffusion model, a generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) model supported by Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to visualize soundscapes through the generation of street view images. By creating audio-image pairs, acoustic environments are first represented as high-dimensional semantic audio vectors. Our proposed Soundscape-to-Image Diffusion model, which contains a Low-Resolution Diffusion Model and a Super-Resolution Diffusion Model, can then translate those semantic audio vectors into visual representations of place effectively. We evaluated our proposed model by using both machine-based and human-centered approaches. We proved that the generated street view images align with our common perceptions, and accurately create several key street elements of the original soundscapes. It also demonstrates that soundscapes provide sufficient visual information places. This study stands at the forefront of the intersection between generative AI and human geography, demonstrating how human multi-sensory experiences can be linked. We aim to enrich geospatial data science and AI studies with human experiences. It has the potential to inform multiple domains such as human geography, environmental psychology, and urban design and planning, as well as advancing our knowledge of human-environment relationships.

Michael O. Johnston, Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River

Michael O. Johnston, <i>Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River</i>

Italian places in Japanese manga: a study on topophilia in graphic narratives

Abstract The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis on how Italian places act as key narrative units in Japanese manga. Building on a quantitative and qualitative corpus study, the paper investigates how culturally salient locations are embedded in these narratives. It is first shown that authors develop salient locations (“places”) as distinct entities playing key roles within narrative structures. It is then shown that these representations of places follow principles of cultural relevance, popularity, historical and geographical faithfulness. This is the case because authors creating manga set in Italy share knowledge and appreciation of Italian places and their cultural import with readers. These results are framed in a theory of geo-criticism and in a possible worlds analysis of places in fiction, hereby extended to graphic narratives.

From the margins of Geographical Information Systems: Limitations, challenges, and proposals

Some of the most exciting progress to address central limitations in GIS is currently originating from the margins of cartographic traditions. This article explores the potential of a proactive engagement with mapping technologies from peripheral positions, such as humanist, feminist, decolonial, queer, and black perspectives, to overcome what we identify as five intrinsic challenges of GIS: the representation of place; emotions; scales; time and change; and relational approaches. The proposals deal with specific concerns that do not fit in existing GISystems and suggest how a creative engagement with mapping technologies further expands our understanding of what GIS could be.

Learning place representations from spatial interactions

The development of geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) systems depends on the ability to learn effective representations of places. To learn accurate place representations from spatial interactions, it is important to extract features that capture both the spatial and non-spatial driving factors. However, existing methods lack a robust interpretation and the explanatory power of the learned representations on spatial factors remains unexplored. Here, we propose an approach to learning place representations from spatial interactions. Our method is inspired by flow allocation, which is the main focus of single-constrained gravity models. We first validate the method on synthetic flows with known driving factors and then apply it to multi-scale real-world flows. Results show that the learned representations can effectively capture features that explain place characteristics, along with the impact of spatial impedance. Our study not only contributes an efficient method to learn place representations from spatial interactions but also offers insights into pre-training procedures in GeoAI.

Gauging the Google gaze

This study explores the visual representation of Great Yarmouth, a British coastal town caught between the urban and the rural, as seen through the quasi-monopolistic image search engine Google Images. The research examines levels of pluralistic or biased place representations to consider how rankings employed by Google Images algorithms represent Great Yarmouth’s identity. The study adopts a visual culture perspective that recognises the role of images in place making and combines digital methods with an image type analysis to investigate how online representations reflect and create the town’s identities. The data shows that Google Images’ preference for representing Yarmouth as a sunny seaside town indicates that the search engine prioritises marketable assets above its connections with its hinterland, its diversity of people, and the cultural activities it has to offer. This, the authors state, is a place far away from Tuan’s (1979) idea of a place that is given meaning and identity from the perspective of people. Instead, Google Images’ representations of Great Yarmouth are an example of a created form of place making as commodification. The article concludes that the inscribed bias and unbalanced search priority criteria employed by the search engine impact upon the diversity of the semi-peripheral town.

Photo-able Urban Green-Blue Spaces

Urban green–blue spaces (UGBSs) are increasingly integrated into the urban fabric transformation, playing a pivotal role in shaping everyday interactions and experiences with nature in the Anthropocene era. Crowdsourcing, facilitated by digital technologies, has emerged as a novel methodological advance for accessing subjective place-based information, allowing the public to produce and share photographs at an unprecedented scale. As people can now readily capture and disseminate images on social media from virtually any location, these photographs contribute to the digital representation of places. Many studies have leveraged social media imagery to explore mental maps of cities, place perceptions, and ecosystem services. This raises fundamental questions: What are the UGBSs that promote photography across cities? What are the similarities and differences among cities’ photogenic UGBSs? And how do cities’ photogenic UGBSs relate to the happiness of their inhabitants? This study investigates these questions through an analysis of 203,020 photographs, taken from social media, of sites across 186 cities over a five-year period (2014 to 2018). Employing Google Cloud Vision and topic modelling with a state-of-the-art neural network model, photographs are clustered and used to identify cross-city features. The correlation between prevalence of photogenic UGBSs and levels of happiness is investigated using linear regression analysis. The results show that UGBSs eliciting photography practice are predominantly characterised by water-related subjects, confirming a widespread aesthetic appreciation for urban blue spaces. Perceptions of UGBSs exhibit significant variability among cities, offering a metric to assess environmental policy efficacy. Lastly, a positive association is found in high-income contexts between number of social media photographs of UGBSs and subjective well-being, while this correlation is not significant in middle- and low-income contexts. This sheds light on human–nature relationships by providing global evidence of how aesthetic appreciation of urban nature influences human well-being.

�Turkestan Collection� � a source of data on Kazakh names and historical monuments

Relevance. This article explores the significant collection known as the �Turkestan Collection�, which encompasses a vast array of historical data on the Kazakh language and cultural heritage. It highlights the importance of this collection in understanding the socio-cultural transformations experienced by the Kazakh people under tsarist Russian governance during the late XIX � early XX centuries.Purpose. The purpose of this study is to analyze the �Turkestan Collection� in order to uncover insights into the native language and evolving cultural practices of the Kazakh people, shifting from nomadic to semi-sedentary lifestyles, and how these were documented during Russian colonization.Methodology. The research method involves a detailed examination of �Turkestan Collection�, which consists of final materials from a census conducted by the Migration Department of the Main Directorate of Land Management and Agriculture. The analysis focuses on the representation of Kazakh names, places, and cultural practices as recorded in this comprehensive census.Results. Findings reveal that the collection contains extensive information on various ethnic names, historical monuments, and cultural traditions of the Kazakh people. It provides a unique perspective on the transition phases of Kazakh society, with detailed accounts of land names, tribal affiliations, and shifts in living patterns.Conclusions. The �Turkestan Collection� serves as a pivotal resource for understanding the intricate history and cultural evolution of the Kazakh people. Despite being a product of colonial objectives, the collection offers invaluable insights into the rich linguistic and cultural landscape of Kazakhstan during a period of significant change and adaptation.

Exploring Social Representations of Mersin as a Place and Türkiye With the Cognitive Mapping Method/ Bilişsel Haritalama Yöntemiyle Bir Yer Olarak Mersin ve Türkiye'nin Sosyal Temsillerini Keşfetme

The representation of place is studied by many different disciplines, such as geography, urban planning, and sociology. Studies on the representation of place share the idea that the representation of place consists of geographical, social, and cultural elements. This study was carried out to examine the representations of Mersin University students regarding Mersin and Türkiye, and their behavioral practices in Mersin. In the study, social and cognitive representations were reached through cognitive mapping. For the purpose of the study, the sample of the study consists of 130 students studying at Mersin University. One of the main differences in these representations is that the representations of Türkiye and Mersin are independent and unrelated to each other. The most important finding is that; Mersin University, important urban spaces, and neighboring countries are almost never included in the cognitive maps of university students. Social and political criticisms against Mersin and Türkiye were frequently seen on the maps. In the maps of the participants, it was determined that the use of place practices differed according to gender. Compared to men, women's place usage practices and place usage diversity are quite limited. In the study, the perceptions of Mersin University students about Mersin were discussed from the perspective of environmental psychology in light of the findings.

Tourists’ perceptions of ‘cultural and creative souvenir’ products and their relationship with place

ABSTRACT Most souvenir research applies authenticity to handicrafts and other local products, while mass-produced, perceived ‘inauthentic’ souvenirs are generally ignored. By de-framing the authentic-inauthentic spectrum, this study examines museum visitors/tourists’ perceptions of ‘cultural and creative products’ with regard to place and other factors that might influence their purchase decisions in China. A qualitative approach was used to address these issues. The results show that most tourists realize the importance of place representation in souvenirs. Various collateral information sources help visitors understand the connection between souvenirs and place. Despite tourists’ emphasis on creativity, participants still found similarities between cultural and creative products sold in different places, which led them to call for more creativity and uniqueness in the souvenirs sector. Besides symbolic value, other factors also influence tourists’ purchase decision, such as functionality, price, esthetics, and quality.

MMCPP: A MULTI-MODAL CONTRASTIVE PRE-TRAINING MODEL FOR PLACE REPRESENTATION BASED ON THE SPATIO-TEMPORAL FRAMEWORK

Abstract. The concept of "place" is crucial for understanding geographical environments from a human perspective. Place representation learning involves converting places into numerical low-dimensional dense vectors and is a fundamental procedure for artificial intelligence in geography (GeoAI). However, most studies ignore multi-level distance constraints and spatial proximity interactions that enable behavioral interactions between places. Furthermore, representing the temporal characteristics of these interactions in trajectory sequences poses a challenge for natural language processing and other field techniques. In addition, most existing methods rely on all modalities from inputs as they use joint training to integrate multiple modalities. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Modal Contrastive Pre-training model for Place representation (MMCPP). Our model consists of three encoders that capture corresponding place attributes across different modalities, including point of interests (POIs), images, and trajectories. The trajectory encoder, named RodtFormer, takes fine-grained spatio-temporal trajectories as input and leverages self-attention with rotary temporal interval position embedding to simulate dynamic spatial and behavioral proximity interactions between places. By using a coordinated pre-training framework, MMCPP independently encodes place representations across different modalities and improves model reusability. We verify the effectiveness of our model on a taxi trajectory dataset using the location prediction task at next n seconds, including 30 seconds(s), 180(s), 300(s). Our results demonstrate that compared to existing embedding methods, our model is capable of learning higher-quality position representations during pre-training, leading to improved performance on downstream tasks.

Volitional activation of remote place representations with a hippocampal brain-machine interface.

The hippocampus is critical for recollecting and imagining experiences. This is believed to involve voluntarily drawing from hippocampal memory representations of people, events, and places, including maplike representations of familiar environments. However, whether representations in such "cognitive maps" can be volitionally accessed is unknown. We developed a brain-machine interface to test whether rats can do so by controlling their hippocampal activity in a flexible, goal-directed, and model-based manner. We found that rats can efficiently navigate or direct objects to arbitrary goal locations within a virtual reality arena solely by activating and sustaining appropriate hippocampal representations of remote places. This provides insight into the mechanisms underlying episodic memory recall, mental simulation and planning, and imagination and opens up possibilities for high-level neural prosthetics that use hippocampal representations.