Making Glue: Public Authoring in Urban Tapestries

Urban Tapestries (UT) is a spatial annotation system allowing participants to contribute text, images, video and audio that are geo-tagged and positioned over a graphical street map of London; but even more than this it is about describing relationships to people, places and things. This ‘experimental software platform for knowledge mapping and sharing’ [1] exists within the Social Tapestries (ST) research programme established and directed by Proboscis, an artist-led studio[2]. From its inception, UT has promoted the concept of ‘public authoring’ as a means to make tacit knowledge contained within a community explicit and available to all members of that community. This paper considers how public authoring is related to the notion of shared encounters through projects using, and building on, the Urban Tapestries platform.