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1. Spatio-Textual Regions: Extracting Sense of Place from Spatial Narratives

   https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8286257  

   Steiner, Erik; Frank, Zephyr; Gregory, Ian; Bodenhamer, David; Ezeani, Ignatius (January 2023, Zenodo)

   Sense of place is a critical concept underlying the meanings attached to locations and locales in geography and related fields. This concept is often ambiguous and complex when presented in narrative text and challenging to represent and analyse at scale. Mapping a sense of place in this regard requires more than finding geographical coordinates or drawing polygons around toponyms. Our paper develops the concept of a spatio-textual region (STR), a method for identifying platial clusters embedded in spatial narrative texts and explores the potential for mapping the results. We demonstrate the method on an 1857 publication by Thomas Nelson & Sons, a traveller's guide to the Lake District in England. We envision that this method could be employed at scale for generating novel representations of the sense of place embedded in tourist literature, personal journeys, and other spatial narratives. 

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2. Cultivating scientific literacy and a sense of place through course‐based urban ecology research

   https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.8985  

   Valliere, Justin M. (June 2022, Ecology and Evolution)
3. Building resilient Oregon coastal communities: Reimagining critical facilities through Latinx sense of place

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2023.103600  

   Stanton, Katherine A; Tilt, Jenna H (March 2023, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction)

   Disaster risk reduction requires the identification and assessment of critical infrastructure that may be impacted during a disaster event and taking proactive steps to mitigate these impacts. Yet little consideration is given towards how systemic marginalization of certain populations may inhibit their access to critical infrastructure. Understanding and expanding our understanding of what is considered “critical” in a community could help build greater adaptive capacity and reduce vulnerability, particularly for marginalized or underrepresented populations. In this case study, we examine how Latinx coastal community residents in Oregon (USA) perceive current critical facilities and their values associated with these places, as well as the identification of new locations that are valued as critical to their community and seen as places they would go to in times of need. Our analysis reveals that hazard resilience planning efforts that focused only protecting current critical facilities without including marginalized community members’ perspective, run the risk of creating inequitable access and utilization of these spaces during emergencies. Our results point to the need to broaden the types of facilities that are considered “critical” and incorporating inclusionary policies within existing critical facilities in order to increase communities’ capacity to respond and recover from natural hazards. The aim of this research is to identify systemic issues in resilience planning efforts, not to catalog cultural differences. 

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4. Sense of place and perceived community change in perceived impacts of and cooperation with local aquaculture development in the US

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2022.101882  

   Johnson, Branden B.; Rickard, Laura N. (December 2022, Journal of Environmental Psychology)
5. Mobile augmented reality supporting families’ immersive collaborative learning: Learning-on-the-move for place-based geoscience sense-making

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-023-09399-9  

   Zimmerman, Heather Toomey; Land, Susan M.; Faimon, Lillyanna; Chiu, Yu-Chen (July 2023, International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning)

   Abstract We investigated how families experienced immersion as they collaboratively made sense of geologic time and geoscience processes during a place-based, learning-on-the-move (LOTM) experience mediated by a mobile augmented reality (MAR) app. Our team developed an MAR app,Time Explorers, that focused on how rock-water interactions shaped Appalachia over millions of years. Data were collected at the Children’s Garden at the Arboretum at Penn State. Data sources were videos of app usage, point-of-view camera recordings with audio capturing family conversations, and interviews from 17 families (51 people). The analytical technique was interaction analysis, in which episodes of family sense-making were identified and developed into qualitative vignettes focused on how immersion did or did not support learning about geoscience and geologic time. We analyzed how design elements supported sensory, actional, narrative, and social immersion through photo-taking, discussion prompts, and augmented reality visualizations. Findings showed that sensory and social immersion supported sense-making conversations and observational inquiry, while narrative and actional immersion supported deep family engagement with the geoscience content. At many micro-sites of learning, families engaged in multiple immersive processes where conversations, observational inquiry, and deep engagement with the geoscience came together during LOTM. This analysis contributes to the CSCL literature on theory related to LOTM in outdoor informal settings, while also providing design conjectures in an immersive, family-centered, place-based LOTM framework. 

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