Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) make it technically possible for digital assets to be owned and traded, introducing the concept of scarcity in the digital realm for the first time. Resulting from this technical development, this paper asks the question, do they provide an opportunity for fundraising for galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM), by selling ownership of digital copies of their collections? Although NFTs in their current format were first invented in 2017 as a means for game players to trade virtual goods, they reached the mainstream in 2021, when the auction house Christie’s held their first-ever sale exclusively for an NFT of a digital image, that was eventually sold for a record 69 million USD. The potential of NFTs to generate significant revenue for artists and museums by selling effectively a cryptographically signed copy of a digital image (similar to real-world limited editions, which are signed and numbered copies of a given artwork), has sparked the interest of the financially deprived museum and heritage sector with world-renowned institutions such as the Uffizi Gallery and the Hermitage Museum, having already employed NFTs in order to raise funds. Concerns surrounding the environmental impact of blockchain technology and the rise of malicious projects, exploiting previously digitised heritage content made available through OpenGLAM licensing, have attracted criticism over the speculative use of the technology. In this paper, we present the current state of affairs in relation to NFTs and the cultural heritage sector, identifying challenges, whilst highlighting opportunities that they create for revenue generation, in order to help address the ever-increasing financial challenges of galleries and museums.

Mashups, composed of mixing different types of software and data, first appeared in 2004 and ‘map mashups’ quickly became the most popular forms of this software blending. This heralded a new kind of geography called ‘Neogeography’ in which non-expert users were able to exploit the power of maps without requiring the expertise traditionally associated, in the geographic world, with cartography and geographic information science, and, in computer science, with data structures and graphics programming. First we suggest the need for a typology of map mashups while arguing that such a typology is premature. We then discuss the need for standards and formats, moving on to questions of security, privacy and confidentiality. We follow this by introducing the key issues of creating spatial data for mashups through crowd-sourcing. To ground this presentation in applications, we explore some classic exemplars from our own and related work with map mashups and portals such as MapTube (http://www.maptube.org/). We then point to extensions to other graphical media, to 3D, to virtual worlds and beyond. In conclusion, we speculate on what all this might mean for GIS software and geographic information science.

In this paper, we present how mobile electroencephalography, or mobile EEG, is becoming a relevant tool of urban studies, including among others, spatial cognition, architecture, urban design and planning. Mobile EEG is a research methodology that requires tightly controlled experiments and complicated analytical tools, but it is increasingly used beyond the clinical and research context to monitor brain function and cognition in real world. It is used to unravel our understanding of the neural processes that enable spatial perception and cognition, while is also applied to the study of psychological transactions between people and the environment, for example to gauge the effects of urban or natural environments on the emotional state of pedestrians. In the near future, mobile EEG could be integrated in the research on cities as a tool to understand the cognitive foundations of urban movement, assess the psychological impact of environments on individuals, or target interventions to improve the quality of the urban environment. In this paper we review relevant research with mobile EEG, as well as the background and methodological issues arising in such projects.

In this article, we explore the concepts and applications of Web 2.0 through the new media of NeoGeography and its impact on how we collect, interact and search for spatial information. We argue that location and space are becoming increasingly important in the information technology revolution. To this end, we present a series of software tools which we have designed to facilitate the non-expert user to develop online visualisations which are essentially map-based. These are based on Google Map Creator, which can produce any number of thematic maps which can be overlaid on Google Maps. We then introduce MapTube, a technology to generate an archive of shared maps, before introducing Google Earth Creator, Image Cutter and PhotoOverlay Creator. All these tools allow users to display and share information over the web. Finally, we present how Second Life has the potential to combine all aspects of Web 2.0, visualisation and NeoGeography in a single multi-user three-dimensional collaborative environment.

The last decade has seen substantial advances in the capacity to record behaviour and neural activity in humans in real-world settings, to simulate real-world situations in laboratory settings and to apply sophisticated analyses to large-scale data. Along with these developments, a growing number of groups has begun to advocate for real-world neuroscience and cognitive science. Here, we review the arguments and the available methods for real-world research and outline an overarching framework that embeds key ideas proposed in the literature integrating them into a cyclic process of ‘bringing the lab to the real world’ (recording behavioural and neural activity in real-world settings) and ‘bringing the real-world to the lab’ (manipulating the environments in which behaviours occur in the laboratory) that combines exploratory and confirmatory research and is interdisciplinary (including those sciences concerned with the natural, built or virtual environment). We highlight the benefits brought by this framework emphasizing the greater potential for novel discovery, theory development and human-centred applications to the environment.

The interdisciplinary Tales of Things and electronic Memory (TOTeM) project investigates new contexts for augmenting things with stories in the emerging culture of the Internet of Things (IoT). Tales of Things is a tagging system which, based on two-dimensional barcodes (also called Quick Response or QR codes) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, enables the capturing and sharing of object stories and the physical linking to objects via read and writable tags. Within the context of our study, it has functioned as a technology probe which we employed with the aim to stimulate discussion and identify desire lines that point to novel design opportunities for the engagement with personal and social memories linked to everyday objects. In this paper, we discuss results from fieldwork with different community groups in the course of which seemingly any object could form the basis of a meaningful story and act as entry point into rich inherent ‘networks of meaning’. Such networks of meaning are often solely accessible for the owner of an object and are at risk of getting lost as time goes by. We discuss the different discourses that are inherent in these object stories and provide avenues for making these memories and meaning networks accessible and shareable. This paper critically reflects on Tales of Things as an example of an augmented memory system and discusses possible wider implications for the design of related systems.