In a paper delivered for the Asian Conference on the Social Sciences in 2024, geographer Vanessa Joy Anacta posed this question: Can you recall the time you got lost in a new area? From the experience of Hansel and Gretel trying to find their way home to first year students of UP Diliman navigating their complex new environment to locate classrooms, toilets, libraries, and places to eat, way-finding has always been resorted to using different strategies and in varying levels of success.
Finding one's way in an unfamiliar landscape can be challenging not to mention disorienting. Maps, signages, photos, and even guidance from people through gestures and verbal instructions used to be the preferred modality of people in the analogue era. With the advent of technology and the way it mediates our everyday lives, Google maps, OpenStreetMap and other online maps become the default wayfinder, for better or worse.
For the eighth iteration of the Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2024, Dr Vanessa Joy Anacta will deliver a lecture via Zoom on Friday, 30th of August 2024 at 5:30PM. Co-presented by the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) and the UP Department of Geography, the talk is entitled Wayfinding on campus: Mapping the familiar and unfamiliar environments, which will draw upon various research projects undertaken by Dr Anacta.
The presentation is divided into two segments. One segment illustrates a quick visualization of the students’ shared spatial knowledge of the UP Diliman campus as demonstrated in the hand-drawn sketch maps. Sketch maps may reveal differences in the acquired spatial knowledge. In an online wayfinding task, participants were asked to follow different types of route instruction. The second segment shows different characteristics of their visualization of the learned environment. The type of environmental layout also affects the participants’ wayfinding performance. The results of these studies have implications for designing navigation systems’ route instructions and visual representation to understand the environment easily.
Dr Anacta is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Her research interests include cognitive geography, wayfinding, spatial learning, geographic education, participatory mapping, and GIScience. She teaches applications of geographic information systems (GIS) in the social sciences, research methods, behavioral and cognitive geography and spatial cognition. Her most recent article discusses the significant effect of the environmental layout on the participant's performance based on deviations incurred during wayfinding.
The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a monthly lecture and resource talk where academic geographers, geography-adjacent scholars, practitioners working in geospatial industries, and in communities share their research findings, pedagogical practices, and field-based experiences. Jointly presented by PGS and the UP Geography, the speakers of Heo/Geo are faculty members, alumni and scholars based locally and abroad. This year's Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a continuation of the 40th anniversary celebration (1983-2023) of the Department. Dr Anacta's talk is likewise sponsored by the Geographic Information Systems and Techniques (GIST) research cluster and is in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals #4 (Quality Education) and #15 (Life on Land).
To join Dr Anacta's talk via Zoom, please register through this link or simply paste this link to your URL: https://tinyurl.com/ya6vufyd
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