'Snow scenes: exploring the role of place in weather memories"

Research background/ context
The concept of place has been seen as providing more meaning to a spatial location by "endowing it with value" (Tuan, 1977 : 6), not only through naming (Edwardes, 2009) but by attempting to understand the place values used by people in appreciating, enjoying, and valuing the environment (Kruger and Jakes, 2003; Norton and Hannon, 1997; Ehrenfeld, 1993). Capturing a richer picture of a person's in-field experience involves measurement of physical properties of a spatial location as only the first step, the next challenge being to acknowledge a greater 'sense of place' and to represent "the memories, experiences and patterns of behaviour we associate with that locale" (Ciolfi, 2004). Moving or walking through a place, however, is thought be significant in helping to build a multi sensual experience of that place while novel technologies are opening up new opportunities for people to narrate, layer, intervene in and contribute to these experiences of places as they move through them (Butler, 2007). In this project, we are interested in developing innovative public engagement methodologies, including locative media technology, that will allow us to gain a better understanding of how a sense of place informs, and is informed by, popular understanding of local climate and weather.
Place has been pivotal to the production, reception and circulation of climate knowledge in the past (Naylor, 2006) and continues to inform how contemporary climate debates are framed. Recent surveys are also suggesting that discourses about climate change need necessarily to be situated within people's locality, as a means of increasing its saliency. Local circumstances, the "everyday experiences and locality", or the situated nature of climate are increasingly being recognised as fundamental to understanding how the public perceives, responds and adapts to climate change (Lorenzoni and Pigeon, 2006: 80; Palutikoff et al., 2004). Particular relational contexts - the places people live and work, their histories, cultures or values - have been identified as critical for understanding how different groups of people in different cultural contexts comprehend weather and climate (Slocum, 2004). Place can also make scientific histories of weather and climate more meaningful to wider publics, by situating knowledge and the work and ideas of particular actors within their geographical, social and cultural contexts (Elwood and Martin, 2000). There have been recent calls for reconsidering "what climate means for people and places and the relationships between people and places over time" (Hulme 2008: 7), with emphasis being placed on particularizing experiences of climate change through investigations of the impacts of weather at the local level (Livingstone, 2012). The proposed collaborative project seeks to address this imperative by exploring innovative ways in which public understanding and experiences of local weather, and specifically experiences and impacts of snow and unusually severe winters, can be captured, represented and shared. One of our specific goals is to develop multimedia based mobile phone applications to test how stories and experiences (based on archive/oral history material) can mix with participants' own thoughts and experiences while in the field and moving through a particular space. These methodologies will help to capture the way in which people, and communities value places (Hein et al., 2008), something that is of increasing value to policy makers, planners and designers in the environmental and tourism sectors.

Work to date
The proposed work capitalises on research conducted as part of two projects funded under the Enhancing the Role of Arts and Humanities Perspectives on Environmental Values and Change initiative. Both projects have investigated records, accounts and memories of past weather and climate in remote areas of upland Britain created during the twentieth century. 'Snows of Yesteryea