This is a guest post by Sarah Cole, the British Library’s current Creative Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Sarah is working on a project called Poetic Places, which explores relationships between literary geographies, cultural heritage collections, and real world environments, via the creation of a smartphone geolocation user experience that shares British Library digital content in relevant real-world locations; enabling participants to experience meaningful “poetic” connections between location, history and literature. 

As the app nears completion, it’ll soon be time to release Poetic Places into the wild and let you good folk experience the result of the project.

To celebrate, we’ve decided to hold a free half-day event at the British Library Conference Centre in London on Friday 18th March 2016, starting at 13:30. We thought this would be a great opportunity to bring together and hear about a variety of projects that deal with literature, cultural heritage and place, to explore different methods and share our findings.

Image taken from page 345 of 'L'Espagne ... Illustrée de 309 gravures dessinées sur bois par Gustave Doré', https://flic.kr/p/hVkQ46

 

Five excellent speakers and myself will be taking attendees through our work, we'll also have tea (& coffee) and a short walk where I’ll invite you to install the app and come exploring the poetic places around the British Library.

We’ll be hearing from:

Sarah Cole, Poetic Places

Andy Ryan, CityRead London

Dr Giasemi Vavoula, Affective Digital Histories

Maya Chowdhry, Tales from Towpath

Dr David Cooper, Manchester Metropolitan University, on literary geographies

Jocelyn Dodd, Talking Statues

 

There are limited places available for this free event, so go to https://poeticplaces.eventbrite.co.uk to secure yours.

For those that can’t make it on the day, we’ll hopefully be recording the event to make it available online.

We look forward to seeing some of you then!