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 (...

Tapestries are an important feature of many historic house and museum collections. They are often displayed on walls as originally intended, either hanging from the top edge or attached around all four edges. Textile conservators are experienced in visually assessing textiles for evidence of damage. Condition assessment by visual inspection is now routine (Lennard 2006). However, such visual in...

" The written text is a recent form of textile, ancillary to those primary texts 'told' or 'tooled' in cloth " (1). Thousands of years before humans could write, they could weave, turning cloth into a commodity, symbol of wealth, and decorative art. In many cultures, weaving has become a common linguistic metaphor as " weave " is used broadly to mean " create. " A weaver " not only fashions tex...

Urban Tapestries provides a mobile location-based platform to connect people with the places they inhabit through their stories, experiences and observations. Currently based on an 802.11b mesh network in the heart of London, ordinary people author their stories of the city and embed them in the places that inspire them. Others who are logged into the system can read these stories, author their...

Social Tapestries (ST) is an exploration into the potential costs and benefits of public authoring, that is, mapping and sharing of local knowledge within the urban environment. The aim of this investigation is to reveal the potential of pervasive computing to create and support relationships that transcend established social and cultural boundaries and enable the development of new practices b...