Author Archives: egordon

About egordon

This blog documents my research on the growing importance of location, place and space in networked social media. I'm an assistant professor of new media at Emerson College in Boston. Colin Rhinesmith, a graduate student at Emerson, is a major contributor to this blog.

Net-Local Tweeting

So there is a lot of buzz about Twitter’s new location API released today.  Not quite yet a feature of Twitter.com, the now available API will allow developers to collect location metadata from each tweet, expanding the utility of individual … Continue reading

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Augmented Deliberation

The central premise of the Participatory Chinatown project is the staging of what we call “augmented deliberation.”  We introduce augmented deliberation as a possible design solution that addresses uniquely difficult contexts where deliberation is complicated by one or many external … Continue reading

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3-D Worlds for Land Use Planning

Holly St. Clair writes about the Participatory Chinatown project in an article for the American Planning Association newsletter.  In explaining what PC will do for the planning process, she says: The emphasis is not just on the computer simulation, but … Continue reading

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Immersive Planning

Methods of engaging communities in urban planning decisions have remained relatively stagnant. Groups of people are assembled into community centers, school cafeterias, and libraries and are asked to provide input on the professional discourse of architects and planners. They are … Continue reading

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Creating Empathy Through Role Play

We’ve made some good progress on the Participatory Chinatown (PC) project.   Building off of the first iteration of Hub2, PC will continue with the focus on creating platforms for “augmented deliberation,” but it will do so by more thoroughly exploring … Continue reading

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Communicative Cities Conference

I just returned from a very interesting conference called Communicative Cities: Integrating Technology and Place in Columbus, OH.  The main goal of the conference was to explore the concept of the “communicative city” and question exactly how cities communicate (as … Continue reading

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Community Engagement Games

We just finished our mock-up of the Neighborhood of Tomorrow game.   The game tries to do something a little different than most location-based games.  Instead of encouraging urban mobility and networking, this game is about location and social cohesiveness.   … Continue reading

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Urban Spectator

Here’s the cover of my book.  It’s finally going to come out, even though it’s still months away.  The book looks at something I call possessive spectatorship in the American city, a way of looking that doubles as a kind … Continue reading

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Paying Attention to the Local

While new mobile technologies are often characterized as distractions from the world around us – just consider the outcry over train operators texting while driving – they are, in fact, technologies of attention.  They get us to pay attention to … Continue reading

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Participatory Chinatown

Hub2, along with our community partners, the Asian Community Development Corporation and the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission, has been awarded a MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Award.  This project is a continuation of the work we started last summer in … Continue reading

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