VFF: Augmented Humanities Practice: The Fluid Site of Annotation

This paper explores the implications of location-based and marker-based augmented reality for creative digital humanities practice in the public sphere. I will focus on augmented reality systems as a way to place historical and cultural annotations in real-time dialogue with the lived experience of real-world spaces, places, and objects. I will show how digital heritage AR projects draw upon traditional approaches to annotating and representing urban places and built artifacts, as well as from contemporary digital mapping, multimedia production techniques, and virtual worlds and games. I'll touch of each of these areas in turn as part of an investigation of this emergent "medium" of expression, drawing upon collaborative case-study projects focused in Venice, Italy; Durham, North Carolina; and Barcelona, Spain. I will also touch upon the concept of the augmented reality marker as a fluid site of annotation, and, in the wake of enhanced computer vision and ubiquitous computing, the implications for markerless annotation systems.