Atlas of Intangibles

In *Space and Place*, Tuan (1977, p.18) notes that “... [a] place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is through all the senses”. Our personal memories of a place are situated in fleeting sensory experiences – the waft of the petrichor, bird songs scoring the background, bakery aromas, sounds of traffic and footfalls whizzing by. This interplay between our senses structures and mediates our sense of a place. However, traditional mapping practices — deriving their methods from scientific paradigms — view maps as objective and immutable artefacts to measure and notate the world. These provide limited guidance for observing, collecting and representing such subjective, qualitative data.

Map-making has a long history of development, where methods for recording and representing geographical information have been refined over centuries (Abrams and Hall, 2008). In recent years, there has been a rise in humanistic approaches to data visualisation, and cartography is now primed for a similar expansion of perspectives.

My talk centers on data experiences that highlight the rich, interconnected web of sensory information underlying our everyday encounters. Showcasing the process behind my work, I examine alternate forms of data collection, such as visual ethnography, score-based data walks, collective mapping, and the design of data experiences that encourage a deeper connection with the places we inhabit.