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

Fulton, Crystal

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

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

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

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

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