new article on "Un-indexing forest media: repurposing search query results to reconsider forest-society relations" in cultural geographies
June 21, 2023
A new article on Un-indexing forest media: repurposing search query results to reconsider forest-society relations that I co-authored with Gabriele Colombo has just been published in cultural geographies. An open access copy of the full text can be found here. Here’s the abstract:
Geographical research is increasingly focused on how digital technology shapes human-nature relations. This article explores how internet search engines and their associated algorithms and indexing technologies order and produce homogenising accounts of forest places. We put forward ‘un-indexing’ as a critical and inventive method for un-ordering and re-ordering search engine results to complicate digital perspectives on forest-society relations. We present Everything at the Forest Park, a series of four speculative catalogues we created to invite collective inquiries into the digital mediation of a forested area in Scotland – Queen Elizabeth Forest Park. Fostering a slower form of engagement with web material, the catalogues suggest how geographers and other scholars might critically repurpose, reappropriate and interrogate the algorithmically curated and advertising-oriented orderings of search engines to foster more careful and convivial forest-society relations.
The four speculative catalogues are available on the Internet Archive:
The article draws on our research exploring how arts- and humanities-based digital methods can be used to understand forest issues and to explore engagement around reforestation as part of the SUPERB project on upscaling forest restoration. Further materials and updates will be shared on this project page on forest media practices.