Place
Place is something specific and concrete, as opposed to space that is not necessarily bound to a specific location. Place is land, a piece of land has somewhat a set of boundaries. These boundaries don’t have to be human-made borders. They can be defined by: a creek, a line of trees, a meadow, a hill, a river, etc. Place can be known and unknown to me, regardless, it is always full of connections. Place is never empty, never bare of. Place becomes fuller the more time you’ve spent in it, the more you see, feel, learn, look, know. Place consists of webs, of relationships, of routines, and systems, and of cooperation. In a place, for it to exist over time, there needs to be a collaboration between humans and non-humans. Place has a variety of qualities. It can take in, it can hold, it can resist, it can give, it can take.
Place-based knowledge, in its most fundamental form, to me means, knowledge that does not operate with the assumption that there is an empty canvas, a vacuum, a clean slate, but that where I am located and where I am standing makes a difference and shapes the way information is structured and transferred. Place-based knowledge means some things are true in a specific piece of land on the planet that might not, or not entirely be true anywhere else. It influences what I notice and how I look at the world, and it shapes my thinking around relationships that make up a place. With regards to online spaces, or, places, I am thinking that place-based knowledge might work as a way of pointing to the relations and nods that are important/relevant in the net/web I am referring to, and making it visible/understandable to others what I am talking about so that my process becomes transparent and others can understand my location in this place. If I want to give others a scientific account of my observations, it will be vital to introduce my location, my vantage point from which I look at the world and its phenomena.
