University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Urban Exploration: Traces of the Secretly Documented, Decayed, and Disused

Fulton, Crystal

Content Files
fulton.pdf

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/109988

Description

Title
Urban Exploration: Traces of the Secretly Documented, Decayed, and Disused
Author(s)
Fulton, Crystal
Issue Date
2021
Keyword(s)
  • information science
  • urban exploration
  • documentary practices
Date of Ingest
2021-05-20T14:58:14Z
Abstract
While formal documentation processes have long been explored in information science, less about more ephemeral documentary practices has been explored. Urban exploration, a hobby in which urbexers visit and photograph abandoned and decaying sites, offers one example of informal and fleeting documentary practice. The visual outputs of urban exploration are often found via websites and social media channels, with reposting by the public facilitating wider dissemination of images. The informal, shadowy, and sometimes transitory documentary practices that feature in urban exploration often exist as digital traces of the hobby. This article explores the documentary practices of urban explorers through semistructured, face-to-face interviews with seventeen urban explorers as well as investigations of their online presence. The highly secret nature of the hobby places urban explorers outside mainstream social participation; however, their approach to documenting and sharing with others reveals a unique means of understanding how individuals gather, create, share, and document information as part of their evolving documentary practices as individuals and as a hobby community.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Illinois School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Series/Report Name or Number
Library Trends 69 (3). Winter 2021
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Genre of Resource
  • article
  • conference paper
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/109988
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2021.0003
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2021 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Owning Collections

Library Trends 69 (3) Winter 2021: Everyday Documentation PRIMARY
Library Trends 69 (3) Winter 2021: Everyday Documentation. Edited by Tim Gorichanaz and Ann M. Graf.