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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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Spatio-Textual Regions: Extracting Sense of Place from Spatial Narratives
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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- Award ID(s):
- 2225179
- PAR ID:
- 10509794
- Publisher / Repository:
- Zenodo
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- place narrative region Lake District NLP visualization
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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