Locating Ourselves: Delving into place-based storytelling
Locative media contextualizes space. It is part mapping and cartography; part storytelling and narrative, part art, part archeology, architecture, and anarchism. Locative media is based in geography and GIS, both neo and traditional. Locative media is mobile and gadget oriented, defined by longitude and latitude, but often found online. Great thanks to the geo-nerds for developing the software and building the handhelds.
It is Baudelaire, Benjamin, de bord, de Certeau, the Situationists, and the Fluenerus. It is the nature poets that give voice to place, and place-based educators who free kids from four walls, creating a critical pedagogy of place. But at its heart lies Yi-Fu Tuan, who explicates “space into place.”
Locative media offers spatially organized interfaces for buildings, annotations of place for journeys, and tries its best to encourages social action. It is theory and practice; de facto, phenomenological, loving Hegel and encapsulated by this stanza, part of the Four Quartets by TS Eliot:
"We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time."
Leslie Rule is co-director of the Center for Locative Media, a non-profit organization dedicated to research and implementation of location-based new media and emerging technology projects. Ms. Rule also runs KQED’s Center for Community Media in San Francisco, working in the fields Education and Community Outreach. Over the last 10 years, Ms. Rule developed a nationally recognized digital media teacher-training program for the American Film Institute, taught multimedia storytelling at the College of San Mateo, and served as Technology Director and as an educational technologist in middle and high schools. She is the author of “The Art, Skill, Craft and Magic of Digital Storytelling—a how-come, how-to guide.”
Ms. Rule is a 2006 Knight News Foundation Grantee in the field of Locative Media. As an acknowledged expert on digital storytelling, locative media, and mobile learning, she was a founding member and sat on the Executive Board of the Digital Storytelling Association. She is also a founding member of the International Association for Mobile Learning and sits on the Advisory Board of ourmedia.org. Ms. Rule has spoken at numerous national and international conferences, seminars, and festivals, including MacWorld, MLearn06, and SXSW Interactive Festival. Over the last decade, she has trained over 3,500 new media storytellers around the world, and spent hundreds of hours in the classroom with educators and students.
