The Place, From Afar

Between Dayton and Springfield there is a small pie-shaped village (at least from afar) near the Mad River called Yellow Springs. This is the place of this project. The home page of the website shows images taken by elementary students of the downtown school grounds. Older photos, a hodgepodge of sense of place images, can be found by searching through the early archives. (Hint! Go to the little tab at the top right of the homepage for more navigation.)

I am not sure if I am going to use this map, per se, but one of my goals is to sync images with maps, eventually creating audio walking tours or other interactive ways to experience place.

I am working on my capstone project for my humanities degree, an observational ethnography of four places found within this map: downtown Yellow Springs (Old Main street cum import tourist district), The Greene (pop-up suburb “city”), the urban core of Dayton (site of intensive street culture revival despite serious statistical decline), and the nearest strip-mall convenience center anchored by a big-box grocery store and fast food chains that took over the fields near the highway a few years back. Just maybe, if it won’t get me in trouble, I’ll take pictures of the base, too.

I’m looking for a conceptual model that will bring semiotics, sociology, and folkloristics together in a way that will allow for some interesting phenomenological insights on how people move through these different sorts of places. The end goal is some kind of commentary on how our land use and patterns of development generate and/or mediate our interactions and our thinking.

Welcome to Middle America. What are you doing here?