Project Proposal / 2005
Place In Place Of
a synchronic journal of places
Jeremy Beaudry
http://meaning.boxwith.com
jeremy at boxwith.com
Philadelphia, PA
Place In Place Of is a web-based project which will use the weblog format to present concurrent and collaborative investigations of place by juxtaposing and running simultaneous blogs featuring regular contributions by participants in several locations throughout the world.
Project Description
The project will consist of a single web page divided into four columns with each column containing an individual place blog featuring dynamic documentation of a specific location. Content will be posted weekly by several contributors living in each represented location; contributors from various disciplines who have a demonstrated affinity for place-related topics will be invited to participate. Posts will be archived chronologically and may be filtered by the category or medium of the entry. Visitors to the site will also be able to reconfigure how the blog columns are displayed by repositioning their order on the web page and, once several locations are implemented into the site, selecting which four blogs appear on a single page. Each post may consist of text, images, streaming audio and video which record and interpret a participant’s everyday experiences of his/her respective location, including for example: the mundane and overlooked, paths, itineraries, movements and modes of transportation, spaces inhabited, social interactions, observations, conversations and stories.
By presenting concurrent blogs, Place In Place Of will present two primary narratives about place: one which is diachronic, that is the unfolding of a single locale in time (within a single column); and one which is synchronic, that is the unfolding of several locales across geographical boundaries within specific segments of time (across juxtaposed columns). The goal of this project is to provide new insight into the relationship between web space and physical space, and to offer new opportunities for using the dynamic, interactive nature of the blog to explore how representations of disparate places can coexist in web space and create new narratives about the meaning of place. By juxtaposing several blogs on a single page, this project remixes the blog format to allow such everyday narratives about distinct places to unfold simultaneously in time and across geography within the framework of web space. In the context of emerging web technologies, this project aligns itself with current trends toward a location-enhanced web in which a renewed interest in localization reconnects the web and web users to physical places.
The design, development, and execution of this project depends upon the confluence of two aspects of my creative and professional life that have previously been somewhat separate from each other: namely, my interest in and research of place through site-specific interventions, drawing, video, and writing, and my work as a web designer and developer. The Place In Place Of website will be built upon an opensource weblog application such as Wordpress (a robust, PHP-based content management system). Wordpress’s high degree of customization, proven stability, and development support make it the ideal application for managing and combining the several individual place blog components. Participating blog contributors will be given individual accounts and will upload their content to their respective place blog on a weekly basis. Over time as more bloggers and locations are added (and others leave the project), the website can expand to feature several “channels”—that is, different preset or user-defined groupings of blogs.