Page - 177 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Tanja Kapp | Journeying the Page 177 Spatial knowledge is illustrated in Personal Geography via the combination of words and images, acquainting readers to the vocabulary of a situated, yet collectively built language of spaces in and around the West Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge. The majority of pages are filled with drawings of specific landmarks, accompanied by the name that Charleston, her friends and her flatmates give them. In the introduction given on the first page of the zine, Charleston writes: I moved to Hebden Bridge with two friends, and we got a border collie. We had the expectation that we would all go out walking together a lot, but in the event, all going at once seemed like a wildly inefficient way of tiring out our high-energy canine child, so we ended up doing most of our exploring individually. We would tell each other where we’d been, but being new to the area, we hadn’t yet learnt the actual names of places, so would find ourselves referring to ever more obscure/specific personal landmarks that we had identified. These would often become known and useful reference points to us as a small group, but be utterly unfathomable to anyone else we would mention them to. (Charleston 2019: 1) The zine thus provides a diction- ary translating the visual to the verbal representation of certain places along the walking routes of the three newly arrived Hebdeners. Unacquainted with any existing local places, Charleston and her flatmates develop their own set of semiotic codes to denote and talk about the localities they encounter, with varying degrees of objective comprehensibility. As can be seen in Fig. 2, some textual descriptions of landmarks only nominally corre- spond to the places they are describ- ing. Additional knowledge pro- duced by the community of friends developing this spatial vocabulary was encoded into the descriptions given to the landmarks. Within Personal Geogra- phy, relevant meanings of iden- tity and space are produced by the individual experiences of walking, and the simultaneous negotiation of these experiences through interpersonal exchange. Driven by the energetic curiosity Fig. 2: Sketch and description of a landmark (Charleston 2019: 2)