Motivation

Places are omnipresent, structuring our daily lives. Among them are our homes (first places), our work places (second places), and further ones (third places) to which we return again and again. From early childhood, we learn how to create places, thereby forming corresponding place concepts. These are by no means static but evolve over time within their socio-cultural contexts.

Communication about places is of corresponding importance, as it reflects what we feel and the identity we sense when being in a place. Narratives are often spanned by places, and in modern information societies, digital communication about places assumes an increasingly important role. Against this backdrop, fundamental questions arise:

• How do we communicate about places?
• How does human conceptualization influence the way we understand places?
• How does place-representation and place-making relate?
• Which patterns underly effective place representation?

Mission Statement

The COPR project aims to address the aforementioned questions about place conceptualization, representation, and communication. More specifically, it aims to

• provide an extensive corpus of place representations for research,
• enable empirical research informed by existing communication and representations of places,
• facilitate the exploration of the great diversity of place representations,
• establish an ontology-driven description of place representations,
• develop into a reference corpus for the study of place representations, and
• make individual representations citable.