Un-indexing forest media: repurposing search query results to reconsider forest-society relations

TY - JOUR

T1 - Un-indexing forest media: repurposing search query results to reconsider forest-society relations

AU - Colombo, Gabriele

AU - Gray, Jonathan W. Y.

N1 - Funding Information: The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work would not be possible without the financial support of the project SUPERB (Systemic solutions for upscaling of urgent ecosystem restoration for forest related biodiversity and ecosystem services), funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101036849. Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2023.

PY - 2023/6/14

Y1 - 2023/6/14

N2 - Geographical research is increasingly focused on how digital technology shapes human-nature relations. This article explores how internet search engines and their associated algorithms and indexing technologies order and produce homogenising accounts of forest places. We put forward ‘un-indexing’ as a critical and inventive method for un-ordering and re-ordering search engine results to complicate digital perspectives on forest-society relations. We present Everything at the Forest Park, a series of four speculative catalogues we created to invite collective inquiries into the digital mediation of a forested area in Scotland – Queen Elizabeth Forest Park. Fostering a slower form of engagement with web material, the catalogues suggest how geographers and other scholars might critically repurpose, reappropriate and interrogate the algorithmically curated and advertising-oriented orderings of search engines to foster more careful and convivial forest-society relations.

AB - Geographical research is increasingly focused on how digital technology shapes human-nature relations. This article explores how internet search engines and their associated algorithms and indexing technologies order and produce homogenising accounts of forest places. We put forward ‘un-indexing’ as a critical and inventive method for un-ordering and re-ordering search engine results to complicate digital perspectives on forest-society relations. We present Everything at the Forest Park, a series of four speculative catalogues we created to invite collective inquiries into the digital mediation of a forested area in Scotland – Queen Elizabeth Forest Park. Fostering a slower form of engagement with web material, the catalogues suggest how geographers and other scholars might critically repurpose, reappropriate and interrogate the algorithmically curated and advertising-oriented orderings of search engines to foster more careful and convivial forest-society relations.

KW - digital methods

KW - search as research

KW - digital ecologies

KW - indexing

KW - unindexing

KW - search engines

KW - forest restoration

KW - forests

KW - ecologies

KW - more-than-human

KW - digital place

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85162734046

U2 - 10.1177/14744740231181566

DO - 10.1177/14744740231181566

M3 - Article

SN - 1474-4740

JO - cultural geographies

JF - cultural geographies

ER -