At the conference Mediated geographies: Exploring the dynamic nexus of media, environment, and place, the LAB contributed with a lecture on the mediation of places. Such mediation occurs through various media, including the visual and the textual medium, maps, paintings, and physical models. The focus here was on textual mediations and documentaries, which draw a picture of a place and, in a certain sense, distort what constitutes the place.

Such distortion can lead to stigamization as can be observed in redlining, a historically discriminatory practice in the USA. The distorted portrayal of certain neighbourhoods alone has led to racial and ethnic minorities being denied access to financial services. Another example is the film The Sound of Music, which presents a certain image of Salzburg and Austria and thus shapes the way American and Japenese tourists think about these places.

Franz-Benjamin had the chance to exchange ideas with Barry Smith and Thomas Bittner during a short research stay at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. The focus was on establishing a substantive exchange and exploring possible collaborations.

In the discussions with Barry Smith, Franz-Benjamin's ideas on the nature of representation and ideas concerning place conceptualization were reflected upon and critically scrutinized. This gave new impetus to both research and current teaching activities in Salzburg. In addition, ideas on processual entities were discussed in the area of formal ontology.

Franz-Benjamin shares a doctoral supervisor (Andrew U Frank) with Thomas Bittner as well as a strong interest in interdisciplinary research: Thomas Bittner works in both the Department of Geography and the Department of Philosophy. The joint discussions were dedicated, among other things, to the quantification of geographical information and corresponding concepts of granularity, as well as Franz-Benjamin's ideas regarding the various levels of representation.

Research on information about places can often practically not be clearly demarcated from research on the places themselves. This is not a problem itself but raises the question of how geographical information science and human geography mutually relate.

This paper discusses four arguments as to why places and information about them are inextricably interwoven in many cases. The difficulty in finding a demarcation between the two lines of research is thus not due to a lack of academic engagement with these topics but rather due to the subject matter itself.

Consequently, research on the role of information in the context of places is indispensable for the study of places themselves. This raises the question again as to whether the separation of geographical information science and geography, as they are currently lived by distinctly different communities of practice, is justified.

Enjoy reading!

The personal and often highly individualized relationship with places leads to a number of questions related to privacy and ethics.

This article addresses both privacy and ethics by arguing that location privacy needs to be considered a proxy for place privacy; that place-making exposes several inherently ethical dimensions, such as the participation in the place-making; and that equitable participation in platial information is an important component of ethical action in relation to places themselves.

Building on this, corresponding need for further research is outlined, specifically concerning power relations acting on places and multicultural perspectives in research about place.

Enjoy reading!

Progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is regularly evaluated. Markus Schaffert, Professor of Geoinformatics at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, researches, among other things, the influence of space and place on corresponding indicators.

As a guest researcher at our lab, Markus will work on the spatial expansion of villages; the visual communication of rural and urban sprawl; and the role of space in planning processes. He will also expand our repertoire of places by the Palatinate Forest as a place of tranquillity with insights from case studies.

Jonas researches the concepts of agency, society, and place. He explores how the concept of place is fundamental in understanding human agency and sociality at large, but also vice-versa.

Within philosophy, his main areas of interest are social ontology, phenomenology, philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind. Beyond this, he engages with further areas that deal with agency, society, and place, such as geography, environmental psychology, and architecture. Besides his passion about the concepts of place, he has a strong interest in decolonial philosophy, philosophy of games, and Ancient Greek philosophy.

Jonas did his undergraduate degree in philosophy in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and his MA and PhD, also in philosophy, in Manchester, England.

Together with soprano Friederike Kühl, Franz-Benjamin Mocnik has received the out of the box award from the City of Salzburg. The prize is awarded to teams that interweave scientific, cultural, and further aspects as part of corresponding events or projects. These are meant for the wider public and should relate to the places Itzling and Elisabeth-Vorstadt.

In the context of the award, Friederike Kühl and Franz-Benjamin will organize three public events under the title music in place – place in music. These events will explore the relationship between art and science in a low-threshold and participatory way. At the heart of this is the integration of the music performed and corresponding scientific explanations. These two aspects will not simply be concatenated but creatively interwoven. The first two events are about music in places and places in music, while the third aims to synthesize both.

The events will take place in October 2024. Further information will follow.

The Geoinformatics Research Days have become an established series of events in Finland, where researchers from the Finnish University Network for Geoinformatics meet and initiate collaborations through academic exchange. In 2024, the event was held at Aalto University in Espoo. As part of this event, Franz-Benjamin Mocnik gave a keynote lecture on place representation and place communication to provide insights into the research of the Space & Place LAB.

The keynote was also part of the GeoSPA lecture series ‘Space, Place, Analysis’, which invites leading researchers in geoinformatics to Finland and encourages international exchange. In addition, he was a guest at the Digital Geography Lab at the University of Helsinki, where ethical aspects of cartography and data science were taught in joint lectures.

Many thanks go to Kamyar Hasanzadeh and the team of the Digital Geography Lab for this invitation in a summery Finnish atmosphere.

The Space and Place team is growing! We are pleased to share that Maia Williams has joined the group and will be working alongside Franz-Benjamin at EXDIGIT. Maia will be starting her own PhD research as well as participating in collaborations within the team, EXDIGIT, and beyond.

Maia has previously worked with spatial data and geographical information systems (GIS) across multiple domains. She has sought diversity in projects, gleaning ideas and skills from specialists along the way – anthropologists, ecologists, architects, urban designers, and data scientists amongst them. Her current research intentions are to better understand the nuanced mechanisms of place attachment and place change, and how place processes could be made explicit and more accessible within computational contexts.

Maia has swapped the Western Australian sandplains for Austrian mountains and is enjoying the newfound vertical dimension!

You can learn more about her here (a work in progress).

Hurray, the Space & Place LAB has officially been launched! We are an emerging lab at the University of Salzburg, Austria, dedicated to the research of places, spaces, and corresponding information. We use a wide variety of methods, ranging from theoretical considerations to applications, depending on what fits best with the various questions related to our object of investigation. With regard to digital media and methods, the lab is in close contact with the EXDIGIT project (Excellence in Digital Sciences and Interdisciplinary Technologies).

We are very much looking forward to our upcoming research! Stay tuned!