Indigenous knowledge of place is not well-served by today's digital geospatial technologies, such as spatial data, maps, spatial databases, and GIS. This paper aims to identify and explore new connections between Indigenous knowledge of place and digital geospatial technologies. Our analysis is structured around three key gaps in past work: (a) the overrepresentation of digital data about space, rather than knowledge of place; (b) a lack of facility to differentiate access to knowledge and enable Indigenous data sovereignty; (c) a lack of facility to support and sustain relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. The paper further identifies and explores recent research topics in the field of geographic information science (GI science) with relevance to addressing these gaps. This includes identifying new serendipitous synergies with previously unconnected research areas, such as research into location privacy, uncertainty, qualitative spatial reasoning, or distributed spatial computing. The conclusions acknowledge that our retrospective approach is unlikely to lead to radical reformulation of geospatial technologies. Nevertheless, we argue that identifying technological opportunities could offer a pragmatic pathway to more rapidly bootstrap new approaches, beyond simply technological "fixes." All Authors contributed equally to the manuscript and share first authorship status.

In 2016, we organized digital storytelling workshops with First Nations1 participants in Melbourne (Australia) to cocreatively “map” sites of historical significance through locative technologies. These digital memory maps allowed participants to share their oral stories about their relationships to different places with broader audiences through a cultural walking trail mobile app from both their individual and their collective perspectives. Functioning much like a museum tour guide in an outdoor setting, we named this app “Memory-scapes,” as it would feature First Nations people's memories of different places, allowing interested members of the public (tourists, students, and educators) to listen to and watch the digital stories as they physically walked the trail. We found that a cocreative archival framework for digitizing these oral histories supported our work with community. Through this project, we illustrate how First Nations people's knowledges are populating the archive in forms that place the control of content back in their hands. These community-driven archives reveal how new archival practices are shifting the media landscape of representational possibilities. While calling attention to the politics of representing place, we also question the emancipatory potential of digital technologies for First Nations people.

This article is about resettled Afghan Hazaras in Australia, many of whom are currently undergoing a complex process of transition (from transience into a more stable position) for the first time in their lives. Despite their permanent residency status, we show how resettlement can be a challenging transitional experience. For these new migrants, we argue that developing a sense of belonging during the transition period is a critical rite of passage in the context of their political and cultural identity. A study of forced migrants such as these, moving out of one transient experience into another transitional period (albeit one that holds greater promise and permanence) poses a unique intellectual challenge. New understandings about the ongoing, unpredictable consequences of ‘transience’ for refugee communities is crucial as we discover what might be necessary, as social support structures, to facilitate the process of transition into a distinctly new environment. The article is based on a doctoral ethnographic study of 30 resettled Afghan Hazara living in the region of Dandenong in Melbourne, Australia. Here, we include four of these participants’ reflections of transition during different phases of their resettlement. These reflections were particularly revealing of the ways in which some migrants deal with change and acquire a sense of belonging to the community. Taking a historical view, and drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic social capital to highlight themes in individual experiences of belonging, we show how some new migrants adjust and learn to ‘embody’ their place in the new country. Symbolic social capital illuminates how people access and use resources such as social networks as tools of empowerment, reflecting how Hazara post-arrival experiences are tied to complex power relations in their everyday social interactions and in their life trajectories as people in transition. We learned that such tools can facilitate the formation of Hazara migrant identities and are closely tied to their civic community participation, English language development, and orientation in, as well as comprehension of local cultural knowledge and place. This kind of theorization allows refugee, post-refugee and recent migrant narratives to be viewed not merely as static expressions of loss, trauma or damage, but rather as individual experiences of survival, adaptation and upward mobility.

This article explores the use of mobile eye tracking to provide insights on the dynamics of haptic (touch/sense) and visual experience. We created a digital cultural walking trail (TRACES), designing an app to explore user experiences of their environment, and as a way to reveal the multilayered interactions between places and technology. Using mobile eye tracker technology to trace a person’s place-based engagements, we show how the design of tablet-friendly apps can enrich experience by guiding viewers through an immersive and interactive environment with valuable information. We also highlight how this activity may negatively impact on experience by demanding attention away from real world engagement.