react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

Digital methods like Geographic Information Extraction from Texts (GeoExt) promise novel perspectives on place by liberating spatial data from unstructured text. Yet their chain of abstractions relies on assumptions that seem fundamentally opposed to critical understandings of place as porous, contested and always in excess of its representations. This paper focuses on the place of Glenferrie: the area I grew up in in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on Donna Haraway and Karen Barad’s perspective of diffraction, and Sophie Niang’s method of scavenging, I use Glenferrie to articulate a method for representing places that repurposes existing processes for text analysis and GeoExt, without reducing the complexity and chaos of place. This mapping exercise explores the tension place exhibits between global/local, universal/particular and objective/subjective binaries to uncover the contradictory landscape of indigenous, colonial and immigrant histories of Glenferrie, while also revealing the contradictory elements of GeoExt and cartographic tools themselves. Place and method are read through each other through diffractions of three components of a typical GeoExt process: toponym disambiguation, the location of place in text, and visualisation in Cartesian and cartographic space. In doing so, I demonstrate diffraction as a practical method for re-envisioning the relationship between computational abstraction and the complexity of place, showing how methods that can seem to suffocate the local and the human might instead become generative, experimental and world-enriching.