PLATIAL’26: International Symposium on Platial Information Science

Whether in film, in a travel guide or in conversation, we often portray places differently from how we experience them in person. At an international symposium, leading researchers came together to explore how such information about places is handled. Discussions covered how narratives shape our mental images of places, how artificial intelligence is changing the way places are represented, how films such as ‘Emily in Paris’ actively help to shape the French capital, and how power is negotiated through information about places. Alongside twenty academic papers, the programme featured keynotes, workshops, and excursions.

The symposium, convened by the Space & Place LAB at the University of Salzburg, forms part of an event series that has run since 2018 and addresses place-based information under changing themes. The community that has grown up around the series regards itself as interdisciplinary and builds bridges between geography and its related field of information science, as well as philosophy, sociology, computer science, the humanities and many other disciplines.

The proceedings have been released and are available here: Proceedings