Tag: Augmented reality

unARchived

Abraham Avnisan
Kent State University

Christian Anderson
University of Washington Bothell

Amir Sheikh
Independent Scholar

unARchived
https://unarchived.org/

Gallery Project Statement

unARchived is a mobile publishing platform and accompanying website that uses geolocation and augmented reality to explore critical histories and narratives of place. Created in collaboration with The People’s Geography of Seattle, as well as undergraduate students at University of Washington Bothell, unARchived is an open-source project designed to enable the creation and distribution of content by and for the public. Using augmented reality technologies, the project engages with archival documents in order to reveal changes in the built environment over time, spark critical conversations about those changes, and highlight efforts to create more just and equitable urban futures. By overlaying current buildings and landmarks with images, historical documents, stories, and other qualitatively rich content, the app can present the changing history of particular places in any number of unique and interactive ways.

As we have been developing and piloting unARchived, we have focused on Pioneer Square, Seattle’s oldest neighborhood, to show some modest examples of what the platform can do. As the project continues to develop, the app will empower communities with different experiences of these histories to create and share their own narratives. Eventually, we’d love to collaborate with communities and support them in creating and sharing their own experiences using the platform.

We hope unARchived will become a tool to facilitate serious analysis and conversation about development, displacement, community, urban culture and ecology, the promises and perils of technology, and other tensions that have been with the city since its founding, and which continue to be actively negotiated in the present. Ultimately, we hope unARchived will become a multi-sited, multi-layered collective project spanning multiple communities and extending beyond the city of Seattle.

September 26, 2019 mappinginjustice 0

Augmenting People’s Geographies of Seattle: Digital platforms as participatory methods

Christian Anderson
University of Washington Bothell

Abraham Avnisan
Kent State University

Amir Sheikh
University of Washington Bothell

This paper jumps off from a discussion of two overlapping place-based projects which the authors and additional collaborators are currently working to develop in the Seattle, WA metropolitan region. One project, called unARchived, entails an open-source augmented reality iOS app and accompanying website, which are themselves sub-elements of a larger umbrella-project called the People’s Geography of Seattle (PGS). The PGS started in 2017 as a university-public collaboration among community-based public historians, artists, storytellers, activists, and faculty at the University of Washington. Both projects draw on frameworks of participatory action research, counter-mapping, and community archiving and story-telling. Rooted in such approaches, both projects aim to curate historical and contemporary images, oral histories, interviews, maps, tours, and other artifacts in a manner which might amplify existing community capacities while at the same time countering dominant, naturalizing understandings of the rapid tech-capital led development and displacement ongoing in the city and the region. Crucially, we approach such activities as methodological starting points rather than outcomes. In that context this paper aims to extend ongoing conversations about how digital cartographic and visual humanities platforms—unARchived being a first iteration of one such platform—might accommodate overarching visions based on the approaches outlined above while also engendering additional engagements including further place-based collaborations, organizing efforts, and anti-displacement actions themselves.

S1.1-Anderson_AugmentingPeoplesGeographies_MIJ2019-1Download
September 17, 2019 mappinginjustice 0