Dr. Craig Dalton Presents at "Playful Learning" Symposium in Manchester, United Kingdom

Dr. Craig Dalton presented an invited paper with co-author Dr. Jim Thatcher at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.  The talk, titled “Drifting with Data: An Experimental Workshop on Contesting Networked Urbanism,” was a part of series of events on “Playful Learning,” organized by the Playful Mapping Collective.  The three day event, held July 12 – 14, 2017, included the launch of the Collective’s new book “Playful Mapping in the Digital Age”, a workshop on the “GoGoGozo” field study program in Malta and “Playfields” a geo-located smartphone game designed to foster geographical critical thinking.

Drs. Dalton’s and Thatcher’s paper develops modes of engaging our personal data (as collected by Google, Facebook, etc.) for purposes different from those companies’ imperatives. They draw on social justice counter-mapping and the Situationist International’s Dérive (drifting) method of seeing moving through urban space as everyday geographical actions not focused on profit. The paper applies these approaches to our personal digital data to map and understand our data differently than the profit-oriented motives of Google or Facebook. The purpose is to prompt people to reflect on how such companies see and understand each of us in terms of our personal location information and to demonstrate what other kinds of maps could be made and what other kinds of geographical relationships we could have using such information.