Describe Your City!

Motivation and Goal: How do people describe their urban environments in everyday life? This project aims to investigate spoken and spontaneous descriptions of urban places from multiple perspectives by bringing expertise from computer linguistics, interactional linguistics, and GIScience. The overall goal of the project is to find links between the physical environment, e.g. buildings, streets, but also colors and shapes, and the way a place is experienced. An umbrella question might be as follows: How much physical space is contained in place descriptions and how do physical and experienced spaces mutually interfere?