Placemarks on Watermarks: Mapping, Sensing and Sampling the “Rivers of Emotion”

Abstract

Maps are a key discourse for conveying geographical information, yet many cartographic approaches struggle to represent the subjective aspects of a landscape or “sense of place.” This paper examines the challenges in mapping emotional engagements with place, considering various cartographic approaches to representing emotions, and how these are complicated by theoretical approaches to conceptualizing place. Where place is theorized as fluid, dynamic, and contingent, we see a mismatch with the logics of cartographic practice and interface design. Participatory digital spatial media offer new possibilities for mapping emotional engagement by overcoming some of these complications. They are thus the focus of the case study of the Rivers of Emotion digital database of emotional engagements with Derbarl Yerrigan and Djarlgarro Beelier (the Swan and Canning Rivers), in Western Australia. The paper reviews emotional responses to the rivers and explores the collation of individual emotional engagements with these places in an online map and database. It concludes with a discussion of possibilities and limitations for mapping emotions and suggests how projects like this can inform collective imagined geographies.

An emotions-informed approach for digital documentation of rural heritage landscapes: Baojiatun, a traditional tunpu village in Guizhou, China

“…Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) methodologies provided guidance for the investigation and recording of heritage landscapes, and hold inherent possibilities for capturing emotions to articulate complexities and in human behaviour, values, social interaction, and experiential engagement with landscapes (Turner 2006;Williamson 2007;Fairclough and Herring 2016). With the addition of digital approaches, there is great potential for documentation to present new, additional perspectives for curating the fluid and multifarious emotional engagements that exist within historic landscapes (Turk 2019). This paper outlines opportunities to include more representative cultural and phenomenological elements as part of digital documentation, by considering how to capture emotional values of heritage sites and assets in the technological processes of digital heritage.…”

“…AIEV are places/things recognised as emotionally meaningful (in this case, to the local community who inhabit the heritage landscape) but not necessarily where people share the same affective experience about the asset. This methodology builds on the concept of 'Feeling Maps', which plot episodes or experiences of heightened positive and negative emotions within geographical spaces or features as 'feeling intensities' or 'emotional hotspots' (Marchant 2019;Turk 2019;Broomhall and Pickering 2012;Weinreb and Rofè 2013). AIEVs exist at multiscale levels and are neither static nor universal.…”