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.

Un-indexing forest media: repurposing search query results to reconsider forest-society relations

Colombo, Gabriele;
2023-01-01

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.
2023
catalogues, data visualisation, digital methods, forest restoration, forests, Google, search as research, search engines, un-indexing, visual methods
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11311/1242218
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