MIX 2025: WRITING WITH TECHNOLOGIES | CALL FOR PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS  

Wednesday 2 July 2025 at Bath Spa University’s Locksbrook Campus , UK 

Now in its eighth year, Bath Spa University’s MIX has established itself as an innovative forum for the discussion and exploration of writing and technology, bringing together researchers, writers, technologists and practitioners from around the world to make, think and talk. After our unique collaboration with the British Library in 2023, MIX 2025 will be hosted in the beautiful city of Bath at Bath Spa University’s Locksbrook Campus. 

As part of our programme, New York Times bestselling writer and publisher Michael Bhaskar, currently working for Microsoft AI and co-author of the book The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma, will appear in conversation. 

MIX is situated within Bath Spa University’s world-class Creative Writing department within the School of Writing, Publishing and Humanities, as well as the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, which also co-hosts the online magazine of writing and technology, The Writing Platform. MIX 2025 is part of the MyWorld programme, which explores the future of creative technology innovation.  

Themes for this year’s discussions include: 

Issues of trust and truth in digital writing  

The use of generative AI tools by authors, poets, and screenwriters 

Debates around AI and ethics for creative practitioners 

Emerging immersive storytelling practices  

In a world where we are facing the challenges of disinformation, replication, and increasingly limited or siloed perspectives, it can feel that there is no place for truth, and that originality in human creativity has been devalued. While many practitioners in the fields of electronic literature and digital art have been experimenting with generative AI tools for decades now, many writers are disputing what they see as the vast infringement of copyright made by the technology corporations behind many LLMs (Large Language Models) and datasets. The writers’ strike in the USA made plain many of the concerns of the creative industries when it comes to the downgrading of their work through automation.  

In addition, the environmental cost of the energy required to generate the computational power behind these tools is often ignored. And while the biases and falsehoods demonstrated by LLMs are well known, there is much more to discuss when it comes to considering the ethics of our engagement with these technologies. And yet, for many creators, AI tools boost productivity, increase resilience, and positively challenge our notions of authorship and authenticity.  

Through our work on the UKRI-funded research project, MyWorld, we have hosted a series of webinars on Writing and Technology, with a focus on the debates and issues with regards to LLMs and AI tools. The 2025 MIX one-day symposium will build on and develop these fascinating and crucial conversations, enabling us to look at the promise of AI tools and the way they can enhance and support creativity, as well as honing our critical thinking in this rapidly developing field.  

MIX 2025 will investigate the intersection between these themes and the challenges and opportunities for interactive and locative works, poetry film, screenwriting, writing for games as well as digital preservation, archiving, enhanced curation, and storytelling with AI. We also welcome papers or presentations on the innovative use of AI tools in creative writing pedagogy. 

Interested in joining us?  

We are looking for proposals for either 15-minute papers or presentations or 5-minute lightning talks from technologists, artists, writers, and poets as well as academic researchers and independent scholars. We are particularly interested in the work and views of creators, audiences and communities currently underrepresented across writing and technology.  

To propose your paper or presentation for MIX 2025, please submit a 300-word summary and a 150 biography of yourself and any co-presenters via our website.  

This will be a boutique version of MIX, with ticket numbers limited to 70.   

£45 full price / £25 students/concessions.  

Deadline for submissions of proposals: 5pm Monday 10 February 2025  

Notification of acceptance: Friday 28 February 2025   

Email enquiries: mix@bathspa.ac.uk  

www.mixconference.org  

The Writing Platform is commissioning articles on how artificial intelligence is being used as a tool for writing for the screen and stage as well as how it is depicted on screen and stage. 

We are looking for articles that engage with the debates and concerns around generative AI and creativity and are keen to publish submissions that explore the benefits, risks, and ethical issues of these tools in relation to their environmental and societal impact.  

We are also interested in emerging writing processes, including co-collaboration and co-creation with generative AI and its impact on creativity. This extends to exploring how AI is represented in fictional forms, such as novels, films, television, games and theatre.  

We welcome articles that deal with experimentation, personalisation, playfulness and technological innovation and encourage submissions with an international focus. Your proposed article might fit into one of the following categories;  

Resource: For example, a how-to guide. 

Research: For example, a paper, article or overview of a research project from an academic or practitioner perspective. 

Experience: For example, an account of a storytelling experience or writing process that you have experienced or developed. 

News: For example, highlighting a new project or opportunity in the field that our readers might not have heard of before. 

Projects: For example, a reflection on a project that you have developed or one that you have been inspired by. 

We are looking for 300 – 3,000-word articles, including 2 to 3 images. We have a small commissioning fund of £100 per article for freelancers and non-salaried researchers.  

To propose an article, email us at hello@thewritingplatform.com with a 100-word overview of your idea and which category or categories it would best fit into.  

We have a rolling deadline for submissions and would advise you getting in touch ASAP to discuss your proposed article.  

Wednesday 2 July 2025 at Bath Spa University’s Locksbrook Campus   

 Now in its eighth year, Bath Spa University’s MIX has established itself as an innovative forum for the discussion and exploration of writing and technology, bringing together researchers, writers, technologists and practitioners from around the world to make, think and talk. After our unique collaboration with the British Library in 2023, MIX 2025 will be hosted in the beautiful city of Bath at Bath Spa University’s Locksbrook Campus. 

As part of our programme, New York Times bestselling writer and publisher Michael Bhaskar, currently working for Microsoft AI and co-author of the book The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma, will appear in conversation. 

MIX is situated within Bath Spa University’s world-class Creative Writing department within the School of Writing, Publishing and Humanities, as well as the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, which also co-hosts the online magazine of writing and technology, The Writing Platform. MIX 2025 is part of the MyWorld programme, which explores the future of creative technology innovation.  

Themes for this year’s discussions include: 

Issues of trust and truth in digital writing  

The use of generative AI tools by authors, poets, and screenwriters 

Debates around AI and ethics for creative practitioners 

Emerging immersive storytelling practices  

In a world where we are facing the challenges of disinformation, replication, and increasingly limited or siloed perspectives, it can feel that there is no place for truth, and that originality in human creativity has been devalued. While many practitioners in the fields of electronic literature and digital art have been experimenting with generative AI tools for decades now, many writers are disputing what they see as the vast infringement of copyright made by the technology corporations behind many LLMs (Large Language Models) and datasets. The writers’ strike in the USA made plain many of the concerns of the creative industries when it comes to the downgrading of their work through automation.  

In addition, the environmental cost of the energy required to generate the computational power behind these tools is often ignored. And while the biases and falsehoods demonstrated by LLMs are well known, there is much more to discuss when it comes to considering the ethics of our engagement with these technologies. And yet, for many creators, AI tools boost productivity, increase resilience, and positively challenge our notions of authorship and authenticity.  

Through our work on the UKRI-funded research project, MyWorld, we have hosted a series of webinars on Writing and Technology, with a focus on the debates and issues with regards to LLMs and AI tools. The 2025 MIX one-day symposium will build on and develop these fascinating and crucial conversations, enabling us to look at the promise of AI tools and the way they can enhance and support creativity, as well as honing our critical thinking in this rapidly developing field.  

MIX 2025 will investigate the intersection between these themes and the challenges and opportunities for interactive and locative works, poetry film, screenwriting, writing for games as well as digital preservation, archiving, enhanced curation, and storytelling with AI. We also welcome papers or presentations on the innovative use of AI tools in creative writing pedagogy. 

Interested in joining us?  

We are looking for proposals for either 15-minute papers or presentations or 5-minute lightning talks from technologists, artists, writers, and poets as well as academic researchers and independent scholars. We are particularly interested in the work and views of creators, audiences and communities currently underrepresented across writing and technology.  

To propose your paper or presentation for MIX 2025, please submit a 300-word summary and a 150 biography of yourself and any co-presenters via our website.  

 This will be a boutique version of MIX, with ticket numbers limited to 70.   

 £45 full price / £25 students/concessions.  

Deadline for submissions of proposals: 5pm Monday 10 February 2025  

Notification of acceptance: Friday 28 February 2025   

Email enquiries: mix@bathspa.ac.uk  

 www.mixconference.org  

From generative writing tools to augmented publishing processes, artificial intelligence is rapidly changing and challenging the landscape of creative writing and publishing. This free four-part webinar series, the second series of webinars from MyWorld and Bath Spa University’s Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (CCCI) and Narrative and Emerging Technologies (NET) Lab, offers an in-depth look at AI’s emerging influence across writing and publishing in multiple fields.   Featuring talks from writers, creators, academics, publishing professionals and AI experts, the series will explore questions such as:    

• How might AI impact the craft of writing?   

• How is AI reshaping the landscape of creativity?   

• How can AI transform game development and player experience?   

• How can AI help screenwriters to develop complex character and dialogue?   

We hope to inspire lively debate and a sharing of ideas and there will be time for questions and discussions. All four webinars in the series are free to attend. 
 

Webinar 1: AI and Creative Writing Practice   

Tuesday 19th November 9AM -10AM (GMT)   

From generative writing tools to augmented publishing processes, artificial intelligence is rapidly changing and challenging the landscape of creative writing and publishing. This free four-part webinar series, the second series of webinars from MyWorld and Bath Spa University’s Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (CCCI) and Narrative and Emerging Technologies (NET) Lab, offers an in-depth look at AI’s emerging influence across writing and publishing in multiple fields. 

Join writers James Bradley, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne and Mujie Li to explore the impact of artificial intelligence on the craft of writing. We will discuss how AI tools can enhance the creative process through the practical applications of AI in research, editing and idea generation. We will explore ethical considerations, copyright issues and the environmental impact of AI tools as well as the limitations of AI for capturing human emotion and nuance and the risk of losing our unique voices. Presented in collaboration with the University of Adelaide and chaired by Professor Patrick Flanery.

Book now: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/thestudiobathspa/t-vvamxol 

A recording of the webinar will be sent to everyone registered. 

Speakers: 

Dr James Bradley OAM is a writer and critic. His books include the novels Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist, Clade and Ghost Species, a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, and a work of non-fiction, Deep Water: The World in the Ocean. He is currently an Honorary Associate at the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, and his new novel, Landfall, will be published in 2025.    
 
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is an author, data scientist and journalist from Sri Lanka. He is also the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Watchdog Sri Lanka, a factchecker, investigative journalism hub and community tech builder. His fiction includes novels like Numbercaste, the Wretched and the Damned, and The Salvage Crew, as well as short stories and the occasional bit of game design. His work has won the Gratiean Prize, been nominated for the Nebula and Independent Games Festival awards, appeared in venues like Wired, ForeignPolicy and Slate, and been Washington Post and Audible bestsellers. He has also shown up on Forbes’ 30 Under 30, been a Dangerous Speech fellow, and spoken at TEDx. He has several cats who care about none of these things and spends most of his time on his homestead in the mountains, learning the care and feeding of potato plants.  
 
Mujie Li is an experimental writer and a researcher of digital media and culture. Her research explores how literary aspects (such as writing, reading, text and language) in digital and computational technological conditions work together to shape digital aesthetics. She is the author of the novella Mirage Time (2017, published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe). Recent article: ‘Media Language and the Technological Imaginary’ (2024).   

Chair: 

Dr Patrick Flanery is Chair and Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. He is the author of the novels Night for Day, I Am No One, Fallen Land, and Absolution, which was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. His short fiction has appeared in Granta and Zoetrope: All Story. His work has been supported by fellowships at MacDowell, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the Santa Maddalena Foundation, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.

In this time of rapid technological advancement, the intersection of artificial intelligence and creative practices has become a focal point of academic research within MyWorld. Recognising the importance of this fast-evolving landscape, Bath Spa University’s Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (CCCI) and the Narrative and Emerging Technologies (NET) Lab recently curated the Writing with Technologies webinar series. This four-part series, part of MyWorld, a UKRI-funded project that explores the future of creative technology innovation by pioneering new ideas, products and processes in the West of England, offered an exploration of AI’s influence across writing, publishing, pedagogy and performance, offering insights for researchers and practitioners. 

The series began with a thought-provoking session on reimagining writing practices through AI. Rianna Dearden from Charisma Entertainment shed light on the application of AI tools in game development workflows, illustrating the potential for AI to enhance interactive storytelling. Reham Hosny of Minia University in Egypt expanded on this theme, examining AI’s role in amplifying socio-political narratives and its potential for facilitating change. The session was further enriched by Joanna Zylinska from King’s College London, who offered valuable insights into AI’s impact on screenwriting and film production processes, highlighting the potential of AI in visual storytelling. 

The second webinar delved into the effects of AI on the publishing industry, featuring talks by Nicola Solomon from the Society of Authors and Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan. They both critically examined the challenges and opportunities presented by AI in publishing, touching on crucial topics such as AI’s role in book acquisition, editing processes, marketing and the evolving landscape of authors’ rights. This session underscored the need for adaptive strategies in response to AI’s disruption of traditional publishing models. 

The series then shifted focus to education to explore the integration of AI tools in creative writing pedagogy. Speakers Lillian-Yvonne Bertram from the University of Massachusetts, David Devanny from Falmouth University and Mark Marino from the University of Southern California shared innovative approaches to incorporating AI in creative writing instruction. Discussions centred on the pedagogical applications of developing ‘small language models’, the concept of AI as a collaborative writing partner, and students’ perceptions of these emerging technologies. This session provided valuable insights into the potential for AI to revolutionise creative writing education and opened up new avenues for pedagogical research. 

The final webinar examined AI’s potential in live performance, featuring talks by Piotr Mirowski from Google DeepMind and Goldsmiths, University of London and Sharon Clark from UWE and Raucous. Their cutting-edge research on AI-assisted script generation and the development of interactive characters highlighted the exciting possibilities at the intersection of AI, performance arts and audience engagement. This webinar demonstrated the potential for AI to not only assist in content creation but also to alter the nature of performance and audience interaction. 

Throughout the series, several key themes emerged that have significant implications for creative technology research and practice. The importance of interdisciplinary approaches was evident, demonstrating the need for cross-disciplinary collaboration in understanding and harnessing AI’s potential across creative fields. Ethical considerations were a recurring topic, highlighting the need for ongoing discourse surrounding AI’s role in creative processes. The exploration of AI in educational contexts provided a foundation for developing new teaching methodologies in creative writing, while insights from publishing professionals underscored the need for adaptive strategies in response to AI’s disruption of traditional industry models. 

Perhaps most importantly, the webinar series pointed to numerous avenues for future research. These include examining the long-term impacts of AI on creative processes, exploring the copyright implications of AI-generated content and investigating the evolution of human-AI collaboration in the creative industries.  

From generative writing tools to augmented publishing processes, artificial intelligence is rapidly changing and challenging the landscape of creative writing and publishing. This free four-part webinar series from The Writing Platform editors working within MyWorld and Bath Spa University’s Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (CCCI) and Narrative and Emerging Technologies (NET) Lab offers an in-depth look at AI’s emerging influence across writing, publishing, pedagogy and performance.   
 
We hope to inspire lively debate and a sharing of ideas and there will be time for questions and discussions.  
 
All four webinars in the series are free to attend and will be held on Zoom and everyone is welcome.  

Please register now to book your place on each session and feel free to contact us (l.chapman@bathspa.ac.uk) with any enquiries. 

 To book: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/thestudiobathspa/t-nozmpog 

 A recording of the session will be sent to everyone who is registered, so if you can’t make the session and want the recording please book a place.  

This year, The Writing Platform turns ten years old. To celebrate a decade of sharing knowledge and expertise around digital innovation in how we make and publish stories we are commissioning articles on the future of digital storytelling to imagine what the next ten years might hold. 

We want to publish articles of approx 750 to 2,000 words on all aspects of innovative storytelling through new forms of narrative delivery and audience interaction. We are looking for articles on storytelling that makes creative use of new technologies or creative ways of repurposing older technologies. These might be reflections on developing your own project or on current issues in digital storytelling. We are particularly interested in emerging writing processes, including co-collaboration and co-creation with generative AI and other forms of data-driven storytelling, such as ambient literature. We are interested in the debates and concerns around AI and creativity and are keen to publish articles that grapple with the benefits and risks of AI from a range of perspectives. 

We are also looking for articles that revisit the topics of our early articles with a reflection on what has changed. For example, you might want to give your advice on how to create a storyworld, create characters or  create plot or reflect on why print still matters in the digital age, poetry or transmedia storytelling.

As always, our attention is on narrative storytelling and poetry and we are interested in experimentation, personalisation and playfulness with form and content as well as technological innovation. We welcome articles with an international focus.

Your proposed article might fit into one of the following categories; 

Resource: for example, a how-to guide

Research: for example, a paper, article or overview of a research project from an academic or practitioner perspective

Experience: for example, an account of a storytelling experience or writing process that you have experienced or developed

News: for example, highlighting a new project or opportunity in the field that our readers might not have heard of before

Projects: for example, a reflection on a project that you have developed or one that you have been inspired by 

We are looking for 750 – 2,000 word articles, including 2 to 3 images. We have a small commissioning fund of £100 per article for freelancers and non-salaried researchers. 

To propose an article, email us at hello@thewritingplatform.com with a 100 word overview of your idea and tell us which category or categories it would best fit into. 

We have a rolling deadline for submissions and would advise you getting in touch ASAP to discuss your proposed article. 

Join members of The Writing Platform team for MIX 2023; the biennial conference on where and how creative writing and emerging technologies meet. Co-hosted by Bath Spa University and the British Library at the British Library, London, on 7th July 2023, the conference coincides with the Digital Storytelling exhibition of digital literature and emerging formats, which highlights digital publishing over recent years, and includes a virtual reality showcase. Our keynote, Adrian Hon, is the co-founder and CEO at Six to Start, creators of game-like stories and story-like games, including the world’s best selling smartphone fitness game, Zombies, Run! 

Spend a day among writers, technologists, artists, practitioners and academics to explore the rapidly developing practice of storytelling in immersive environments. 

Tickets from £17.50 – £35 (including lunch)

Visit mixconference.org for the full programme and booking information.

7 July, 2023 at the British Library, London

Plus an optional afternoon tea and tour of the Digital Storytelling with the exhibition’s curators on 6 July, 2023

MIX 2023, the biennial conference on where and how creative writing and emerging technologies meet, will be co-hosted by Bath Spa University and the British Library. It will coincide with the British Library’s Digital Storytelling exhibition of digital literature and emerging formats, which will highlight digital publishing over recent years. MIX 2023 will enable scholars and practitioners to come together to explore the exhibition at the British Library as well as share current research and practice in the rapidly developing field of storytelling in immersive environments.

Major themes for MIX 2023 will include text in immersive media, interactive and locative works, digital and film poetry, narrative games as well as digital preservation, archiving, enhanced curation and storytelling with AI.

MIX 2023 is looking for proposals for 15 min papers or presentations and 6 min lightning talks from technologists, artists, creative writers and poets working in the digital realm as well as academic researchers and independent scholars. They are particularly interested in the work and views of creators, audiences and communities currently underrepresented across writing and technology. Papers, presentations and lightning talks focused on teaching and pedagogy are also welcome.

Visit the MIX website or email MIX@bathspa.ac.uk for more information.

We are two academics who met in Cape Town when  our children became friends. Conversations around our shared interests in history, technology and Cape Town’s District Six got us speculating about social justice pedagogies in our respective disciplines. Our preliminary discussions revealed  many parallels in our approaches but also intriguing  distinctions, enough to seed a commitment to collaborate. At the time, Siddique was teaching geomatics students who were studying towards qualifications in land surveying and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). David, an archivist, was organising immersive professional experiences for University of Michigan (U-M) graduate students with NGOs in Cape Town through his school’s Global Information Engagement Program (GIEP). In this article we discuss our three-plus years of collaboration to enhance social memory through joining traditional primary sources with emerging information technology tools in District Six, with emphasis on our latest effort to integrate Augmented Reality (AR) with GIS, archives, and storytelling.

District Six in Cape Town is perhaps the most well-known site of apartheid forced removals (some 60,000 Black individuals between 1968 and 1983). It was a cosmopolitan, multi-racial and multi-denominational urban community viewed by the government as a slum that violated the edicts of apartheid’s ‘separate development’ segregation ideology. It was also favourably located close to the city centre, nestled in between Table Mountain and the sea. Upon removal of the residents, almost every building (houses, community halls, shops, public amenities, health facilities, cinemas, nightclubs, hotels, factories, businesses) was demolished by bulldozers, except for a few mosques, churches and schools. Today, the site sits largely unreconstructed and its legacy and future remains deeply contested. The last four months of 2021 saw District Six mired in controversies over redevelopment planning, city evictions of the homeless, restitution and resettlement for ex-residents, and increasingly realised fears that many returning claimants will pass away before securing one of the District’s newly constructed homes (Bantom, 2021; Charles, 2021; Lepule, 2021; Thebus, 2021).  

Our collaboration started in 2018 and builds on the surveying and mapping work carried out by Siddique on the site since 2006. As a much-needed decolonising pedagogy in engineering education, Siddique attempted to conscientise students to the socio-political-historical aspects of the site that their university was situated on. The university, which was originally called Cape Technikon, was built on a large portion of the demolished District Six, and was a Whites-only institution during apartheid. In Cape Technikon’s curriculum, District Six’s troubled history was silenced and buried under the technical language of geomatics. Fieldwork tasks were ahistorical – the rubble under their feet was nothing more than land that needed to be accurately measured and represented on a map. This needed to be changed, and Siddique’s students started to dig up the past, linking mapped locations to what (and who) used to exist there before. 

Figure 1: District Six aerial photographs. Top left – 1953; Top right – 1968; Bottom left – 1983; Bottom right – 2019.

Figure 1 shows four GIS maps of the same geographical space. The red line is the outline of District Six, the area that was declared Whites-only in 1968. One can observe the drastic changes on the landscape. In 1953, District Six was fully developed, with narrow streets and dense concentration of buildings. By 1968, the first signs of demolition were observable. In 1983, District Six resembled a war zone, with most buildings destroyed, and in 2019, much of the district was open space, with the CPUT campus a dominant feature.

Our first efforts in 2018 were consciously designed as an interdisciplinary effort to join geomatics, archiving, and storytelling. We sought to virtually reconstruct aspects of District Six in terms of the lost built environment and stories of still living ex-residents and their experiences before, during, and after demolition. We  brought together a wide range of stakeholders, including ex-residents, St. Mark’s Church (one of the few structures that survived demolition), the District Six Museum, GIEP, and the departments of Town & Regional Planning and Civil Engineering & Surveying at CPUT. St. Mark’s then current rector wanted to foreground the church’s history and reached out to Siddique. At an early project planning meeting at St. Mark’s, we pitched the idea of using its baptismal records and integrating them with Siddique’s mapping efforts and the memories and archives of selected ex-resident parishioners.The baptismal records date from the late 1800s and are a potent symbol and source of District Six’s heritage, documenting individuals, families, social networks, livelihoods and how they manifested across space and time. 

We created a prototype demonstrating that it’s possible to accurately plot the addresses extracted from the baptism records and connect them to the life stories of ex-residents. The prototype selected and mapped approximately 2,000 baptisms between 1950-1958. This was a detailed undertaking that involved onerous human and computing efforts of extracting, checking, and scripting to clean the data. CPUT students created a GIS map that geolocated addresses and integrated it with maps of other sites in District Six. This work represents the first comprehensive digital historical spatial record of District Six that contains discrete and granular locations of a diverse range of important sites (such as businesses, public services, streets, and the homes of baptised babies). Figure 2 shows some of the sites, overlaid on the 2019 map.

Figure 2: Geo-location of specific sites in District Six on the contemporary landscape.

A collaborative exercise with the GIEP team confronted the vagaries of deciphering handwritten baptism entries, confirming and normalising street names and addresses and locations. We worked with St. Mark’s to identify ex-residents who were willing to share their District Six experiences through recorded oral histories supplemented by their own personal archives. Six ex-resident St. Mark’s parishioners agreed to participate. Interviews covered a range of community members. Each participant was photographed with their baptismal record, and copies made of any records they chose to bring in to aid their storytelling, such as childhood photographs and/or mementos. All generated materials from this iteration – including the digitised baptism registries, the oral history methodology, permissions, and oral history recordings – was deposited with the District Six Museum under a deed of gift. (Huang, Leal and Rubin, 2018).

In 2019, we built upon this work with a second GIEP and CPUT cohort. The District Six Museum hosted this effort. In this iteration, we sought to strengthen our oral histories, identify and plot key landmarks on the GIS map, and integrate all of this as a publicly accessible interactive multimedia website. We re-interviewed five of the six 2018 storytellers and added two new ones. We mined the District Six archives to locate archival images and supplementary primary sources of twenty-nine landmarks: eight social centres, a hospital, nine places of worship, seven schools, and 4 cinemas/bioscopes. Finally, we integrated all of this information onto the museum’s website as an online experience that enables visitors to overlay historical District Six with the contemporary landscape, learn storytellers’ biographies through geolocated photographs, documents, and audio, and identify, locate, and learn about historically significant landmarks (Cox et al, 2019). This effort is now hosted by the District Six Museum’s website as the ‘St Mark’s Memory Mapping Project’ (Figure 3). Siddique’s follow-up work, a 21 minute video provides vivid evidence of the fruits of joining geomatics and archiving to tell the story of erased pasts (Motala, 2019). 

Figure 3: Snapshot of the St. Mark’s Memory Mapping Project website.

Over the past two years, Siddique developed a ‘Haunted Walks of District Six’ walking tour, using analog printouts of the GIS map and historical images of the tour’s stopping points. To date, this analog version of Haunted Walks has been delivered to some 200 individuals – academics, students, artists, filmmakers, and ex-residents. The goal is to provide walkers with a deeply affective and transformative experience by integrating the primary sources described above with real time traversing of the contemporary landscape. This approach deploys the ‘counter-surveying’ methodology, which combines land surveying and mapping to find and mark the locations of sites on the physical landscape that no longer exist (Motala and Bozalek 2021). This method can identify the exact locations of demolished homes in the present day for the benefit of ex-residents, as well as to locate other sites to reinforce and graphically illustrate the gravity of what was lost during demolition. 

We now believe that the current analog version of the walking tour needs to be reimagined, strengthened, and experientially enriched with the thoughtful incorporation of digitised and digital content via AR technologies. As an interactive technology that runs in real time and registers and co-locates contemporary and virtual historical objects with one another through handheld devices such as mobile phones and tablets, AR is a logical next step in our collaboration. We are now recasting the Haunted Walks tour as an AR enhanced experience. Users will be directed to the precise locations of important demolished sites in District Six and be shown what used to exist at that location through stories, superimposed archival images, documents, videos and sound clips. AR will enable walking tour participants to immerse themselves simultaneously in both the contemporary and historically erased landscape, essentially co-geolocating themselves across time. 

To continue this work, in 2021 we received a collaborative faculty seed grant from  U-M’s African Studies Program’s African Heritage and Humanities Initiative, running through 2022. This work is directed towards a decolonial praxis based on connecting developments related to our scholarship in social justice geomatics (Zembylas et al 2021) and archival social justice (Wallace et al 2020). It will explore new heritage-related theoretical and praxis directions for engineering, archiving, information technology (AR and GIS), and their intersections in social justice memory work. Work is proceeding along three axes, 1. Theoretical (joining counter-surveying and social justice archiving to probe the intersections of ephemerality, affect, and non-institutionalized memory making); 2. Methodological (development of counter-surveying and memory making and transmission praxis) 3. Socio-technical (incorporation of AR to transform the Haunted Walks experience). We will reinvent the embodied experience of the Haunted Walk, with prospect for application to other contexts of forced removal, recovered and contested memory, and ongoing justice-seeking and activist efforts (acknowledgment, memorialisation, restitution, and reparations). 

However, we also take seriously the advice of Tuck who warns against such work as being solely aimed at the documentation of damage. Whilst damage-centred narratives are often collected and deployed benevolently, the resulting work provides a one-dimensional view of Blackness and disenfranchised communities (Tuck & Yang, 2014). We seek to meaningfully contribute both to more fine-grained understandings of apartheid planning practices and the experiences of those subjected to them. Instead of solely focusing on the documentation of damage, we are equally ‘concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives’ (Tuck, 2009, p. 416). We also want to attract a younger generation of technologically adept South Africans, which is especially critical in light of the nation’s ongoing efforts to decolonise its curricula and grapple with its apartheid past and its afterlives. Through this community-based work, we seek to leverage creative technologies, stimulate affective responses in walker-users, and assist students and researchers in reimagining the historical remnants of the ex-apartheid city and its continued effects on the contemporary urban landscape.

To date we have laboured to reimagine and reconstruct the walking tour as an AR app by plotting out specific notable and not well known points of interest. We are  collaboratively working with the District Six Museum’s archives to identify photographs that can be precisely located and superimposed onto the contemporary landscape. We have ideated and envisioned the user experience via a 2.5km walking loop and how that will manifest as virtual content delivery and interactivity via historical narratives and stories and locational positioning in the real world. We have identified necessary pragmatics of pre-tour set-up (route and tour points, disclaimer and liability waiver, operationalising the tour on users’ devices, interface design, location awareness, and toggling between the historical and contemporary landscape), user orientation to and experience at tour points (navigation, multimedia content display of text, audio, visual and moving image, overlaying historical photos on the contemporary landscape), and ending (feedback, sharing on social media, contact information). 

The biggest early challenge has been identifying and evaluating the tradeoffs on alternative AR platforms, given due consideration of the constraints facing prospective users in District Six: device requirements and operating system; navigation; data usage, and; feasibility to realise the completeness of our vision. We want a user to be able to use an Android smartphone or tablet to download our app and be empowered to take a self-guided tour. Project staff have explored AR possibilities mindful of these needs. We have evaluated the status and capabilities of available AR tools / applications along the following parameters: functionality; usability; learnability; incorporating multimedia content and geolocational data; content management; open source vs proprietary; costing; editability, and; prospects for persistence (longevity). After carefully reviewing nine alternative possibilities, we are using Unity3D as our AR authoring environment. It will allow us to integrate our GIS maps, develop our own user interface, activate the user device’s GPS for navigation and camera for transposing historical photographs onto the contemporary landscape.

Parallel to the AR effort, project staff are modifying the current analog version of the tour by developing a curated digital repository of existing and new archival and other supporting primary source materials. This will strengthen and expand walking tour content. This will be supplemented by the development of new and expanded tour narratives / storytelling. For example, we envision that one of the points that will be visited through the app will be Horstley Street (Figure 4), which was an important street in the history of District Six. The buildings of Horstley Street were completely razed, but the original cobblestone street remains.

Figure 4: Horstley Street before demolition (left, District Six Museum archive) and today (right).

Ultimately we value the expansion into AR not as technology for its own sake but rather as a tool to create powerful affective embodied experiences for walkers-users. It is one thing to see the remnants of District Six as pins located on digitised historical and contemporary aerial photographs, as was done with our previous work. We believe the embodied and embedded process of walking across the contemporary landscape to visually ‘see’ what used to be there provides a more tangible, meaningful, and moving experience that will create a lasting impact. We anticipate launching the app in 2022.

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