“Off the beaten map”: Navigating with digital maps on moorland

Abstract

Resources made available through the digital map app change, but do not replace, the skills of “ordinary wayfinding.” Looking at the challenges of wayfinding with new mobile devices helps inform the development of digital mapping tools for navigating through difficult terrain. With this background in mind, in this paper we consider how the contemporary navigational resources of mobile devices with GPS, and the resources of countryside landscape features, are brought together in visiting a tourist site. We analyse video data from groups walking across unfamiliar moorland terrain, following a guide and map app which takes them on a tour of a remote Roman marching camp in the Brecon Beacons National Park, Wales. Following an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, we examine three instances of navigational work for paired walkers as they traverse the moorland. The three fragments are of: an orientational struggle to establish where to go next; a routine check to select a path; and the discovery of a feature mentioned in the guide. Across the three episodes we explicate how our walkers make sense of the guide and map in relation to investigating the moorland surface. We examine how their ambulatory and undulatory practices on the moorland are tied to their wayfinding practices. While we analyse wayfinding talk, we also attend to the mobile practices of stopping and pausing as part of practical navigational reasoning.

Maps, mobility, and perspective: remarks on map use in producing an orienteering course

“…A feature of Liberman's (2013) occasioned map tutorials was the joint accomplishment of the confidence that the journey the students followed was indeed the journey the designer of the map (other students in the class) had intended them to make. As Brown and Laurier (2005a), Haddington and Keisanen (2009) and Smith et al (2020) all find, wayfarers often proceed even when there is little existential certainty about their environment, location, 'correct' route, or where precisely they must eventually end up.…”

“…'Getting on the map' (Garfinkel 2002) and having 'just enough' existential certainty to proceed is a common resource for enabling mobility, assuming that a degree of 'grounding' will occur once new perspectives develop and environmental resources emerge (Smith et al 2020;Laurier et al 2016). Referring again to the wayfinding of students in his map tutorials, Liberman (2013: 62) questions how wayfinding occurs when there is little certainty available:…”

Smartphone interactions and nature benefits: How predominant approaches picture social life and ways of advancing this work

“…One study on this topic accordingly recommends that hikers are told about how apps can undermine the experience so that they can ration their smartphone engagement accordingly (Amerson et al, 2020). A further study, this time drawing on observational methods, sheds a different light on how smartphone apps and social dynamics intersect by videoing walkers on the moorlands of mid Wales (Smith et al, 2020).…”

‘Never mind the bullocks’: animating the go-along interview through creative nonfiction

“…Two participants offered overview sketch maps for use during their go-alongs as a way of triangulating the route in concert with their own embodied place references. At points of path divergence, discussions often ensued as to what constitutes a 'proper' path that might align with those depicted on the sketch maps, as opposed to more informal routes carved out by humans and non-humans over time (Smith et al 2019). At these moments, participants' intimate sensory knowledge of the immediate surroundings was essential in keeping us en route, only twice requiring the timely help of passing strangers (in each case, this was with participants who otherwise walked with sighted companions who would usually lead route navigation).…”