Sébastien Caquard is an associate professor in the department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University (Montréal). His research lies at the intersection of mapping, technologies and the humanities. In his current research, he seeks to explore how maps can help to better understand the complex relationships that exist between places and narratives. This research involves the mapping of a range of fictional and real stories, which include cinematographic ones, as well as the life stories of refugees and indigenous peoples. As the director of the Geomedia lab, he has led the development of an online narrative mapping application, and he is involved in a variety of exciting projects that require alternative ways of thinking cartographically. He is also the chair of the Commission on Art and Cartography of the International Cartographic Association (ICA).

Yannick is a PhD student at Université de Montréal's Geography Department in co-direction with the Geomedia Lab at Concordia University. Drawing on participative and activist methodologies, his PhD research focuses on the potential of (digital) data and (digital) tools to foster community relations and to support housing struggles. His primary interests are housing justice, financialization of housing, data activism, and alternative cartographies. Outside academia, Yannick likes to spend time in protests and code (even though he's still a novice). He also has two cats named Achille and Chlore.

Flandrine is a PhD student in urban studies at the INRS, in Montréal, since 2020. Before that, she studied in urban planning, geography, urban and environmental sociology, and she developed a large interest on maps as tool for urban planning as well as collaborative process of reflection on territorial dynamics. Her subject of thesis concerns the long-term impacts of memory of expropriations on the construction of territorial identities. She is working on the Mirabel Airport case and she's using emotional and interpretative maps to understand these impacts.

Emory finished his BA in Urban Systems at McGill University and has been an active member of the Geomedia Lab throughout his MSc at Concordia University. Emory is interested in people’s geographic imaginaries. Firstly in how they are influenced by personal mobility, social ties and media-exposure and, second, how these spatial imaginaries are performed on social media platforms and through oral narratives. By mapping such communicated imaginaries, he hopes to better understand the plurality of perspectives that shape conceptions of place. His thesis work applies this framework to representations of public spaces in Montreal found on Twitter. Since 2015, he has also been an active contributor to the Geomedia Lab’s ongoing project on mapping migrant oral life stories.

Kevin Pinvidic is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. His process focuses on the experience of the city and its appropriation by its citizens through the lens of urban planning. First encompassing painting and drawing, Pinvidic repurposed architectural representations such as plans, models or digital softwares to transpose his own wandering in the city. During his MFA, he then pushed the idea of the whole city as his own studio, which gave shape to scenographies where residual matters and theatre elements, such as lights and projections, were assembled in site-specific works. Pinvidic now explores the multiple crossroads between scenography, urban studies, geography, and computation arts in a performative and collaborative method with citizens. For this purpose, he joined the Geomedia Lab to add collective and participative mapping (tools and methodology) to his performative exploration of the city. Trained in design and architecture (Ecole Boulle, Paris, 2008, National School of Architecture of Versailles, 2010), Pinvidic has then graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from UQÀM university in 2015. He is currently a Ph.D candidate at Concordia University (INDI program). Complementary to his artistic practice, Pinvidic collaborates in creation research groups and works in the field of scenography for performing arts.

Sepideh Shahamati is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University. Her research revolves around the intersection of gentrification, storytelling, and cartography. More particularly, she is exploring the use of stories and maps for representing the impacts of forced displacement in Montreal. In her most recent research, she created the Atlas of Intangible Heritage of Parc-Extension. This Atlas uses a number of maps and an audio-walk to represent and spatialize the geography of stories and memories of the residents of Parc-Extension.

Sarah Bengle is a spatial designer (UQÀM 2017) and a current graduate student in Geography (Concordia 2023) with a background in Art History (UdeM 2013). Their research deals with utopian geographies, social economy and notions of commons. Previously, Sarah was a co-founder of Dimanche Design, worked in the Quebec film industry and was a project manager at Architecture Without Borders Québec. Their Master’s research looks at alternatives mode of city making through a research-creation project anchored in a transitional urban planning project in Montréal.

Léa joined the Ph.D. program at Concordia University’s Geography, Planning, and Environment Department in September 2019. After completing a master’s in Cultural Geography at Wageningen Research Institute in the Netherlands, she became fascinated by the power of maps as storytelling devices. She is dedicating her Ph.D. research to strengthening alliances that engage settler and Indigenous communities around the land-based issues that unite and divide them. For this, she assesses the potential and limits of repatriating state-sanctioned historical materials and repurposing them as “counter-archives”. With this information in hand, she produces maps and other creative repurposings to augment the ways Indigenous-led campaigns reach their target audiences.

Born in Montreal, she completed her BA at Concordia University and her Landscape Design certificate at Guelph University. She is currently working on her MSc at Concordia University in Geography, Urban and Environmental Studies. She is a semi-retired Landscape Designer after many years of working on both commercial and residential properties. She is passionate about history and volunteers her time to community programs aimed at protecting and promoting history, whether it is researching for a project for the McCord Museum, interviewing for a documentary or fundraising for family history societies, it is a contribution she considers invaluable for future generations. As a member of the St. Columban Irish, she was part of a team of volunteers who worked tirelessly to raise funds to restore an Irish cemetery containing many broken headstones, some dating back to 1826. She has served in many volunteer capacities, such as coach, manager, and fundraiser in local sport and educational institutions with an aim to provide opportunities for kids to flourish. She sits on the Board of Directors of the Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation whose mission is to build a beautiful world-class memorial park and cultural green space at the Montreal side of Victoria Bridge, around the site of the Black Rock. Kelley continues to actively pursue her passions and is president of the Canadian Irish Migration Preservation Network, whose mission is to research and promote Irish Heritage in Canada and abroad and to create a dynamic network of groups and individuals with similar goals.

Elise Olmedo is a Post-doctoral Researcher at the department of geography, planning and environment at Concordia University. She defended her Ph.D. in Geography in 2015 at Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. The topic of her thesis centers on the ability of cartography and mapping to represent the world of emotions, sensations and affective atmospheres, which are usually left behind by classical maps. Her current work deals with theoretical and empirical practices to develop the concept of sensibility mapping ("Cartographie sensible" in French) as a research-creation tool based on a processual approach. Far from the representation of a unique fixed space, this methodology offers an evolving point of view on places more adapted to geographical perceptions and subjectivity through a dialogue between graphics and experience. professor Sébastien Caquard supervises her current Banting project (2019-2021). Its goal is to develop and implement a subjective-narrative cartography to complement the Atlascine software. In order to do so, this project focuses on the representation of memories of Rwandan exiles. Concretely, this research is based on 31 narratives of Tutsi genocide survivors compiled at the Centre d'Histoire Oral et de Récits Numérisés (CHORN) at Concordia University.

Anja graduated from Simon Fraser University with a Bachelor of Arts in Social Anthropology in 2012. Upon graduation, she focused her energy on storytelling—spoken word poetry performance and personal story collection as an affiliate researcher of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. She began her Master of Science in Geography, Urban and Environmental Studies in 2016, with a desire to uncover the intimate construction of public spaces. Her thesis work centres on the collection and exposure of personal stories from three downtown Montreal alleyways through mapping and installation art.

Dr. Marie Lavorel holds a Ph.D in Museology, Mediation & Heritage from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) and Information et Communication Sciences from Université d’Avignon et des pays de Vaucluse in France. Her research focuses on the making of Heritage from sensitive and traumatic memories, the writing of contemporary history, oral history, contemporary art and dance, public art and contemporary architecture. She is interested in creative processes and media writing of memory, heritage, exhibition and art. Moreover, Dr. Lavorel is interested in the collaborative dimension of these processes and the commitment of the actors involved. She also studies the way knowledge is publicized through new digital and interactive platforms. At McGill University, she has recently completed a postdoctoral research on public art in hospitals. She is now preparing an exhibition that will combine contemporary dance and media arts in an interactive installation. At the same time, she accompanies contemporary artists through writing and curatorial projects. She is also a freelance curator and teaches Museology at UQÀM. She is currently Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University (COHDS and Geomedialab) where she is centrally involved into the development of the Living Archives of the Rwandan exiles and Genocide Survivors in Canada.

Rodolphe Gonzalès is a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University’s Department of Geography and Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS). After a M.Sc. (Geography, Université de Montréal, 2009) in interactive spatio-temporal visualisation, a Ph.D. (Geography, Université de Montréal, 2016) in network theory, and a postdoctoral fellowship in the same field (University of British Columbia, 2017), his current focus is on developing an online, interactive application to allow the exploration of Rwandan genocide survivors’ life stories. This project builds upon the COHDS’ Stories Matter database as well as Sébastien Caquard’s work on narrative mapping (atlascineproject.wordpress.com), and aims at providing ways to seamlessly interact between multimedia contents and their representations in space and time. Rodolphe also has an interest in visual, interactive media creation, including video game, animation and film-making.

The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.
― Vera Nazarian

Julian Zschocke finished his B.A. in media studies at the Philipps University, Marburg in 2014. His thesis focused on transmedia storytelling. While volunteering in Uganda in 2015, he published his first essay on video gaming entitled “New super retro Mario Bros.” in the book Retro Games und Retro-Gaming. Nowadays he is working part-time in as a scriptwriter in a german filmproduction. Zschocke is also currently enrolled in the program ‘M.A. Human Geography: Globalization, media and culture’ at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. As a media geographer his main research interest is examining how fictional content can be able to shape the real world.

José is a Ph.D. student at Concordia University’s Geography, Urban, and Environmental Department. Drawing on new cartographic theories and practices such as Deep Mapping, his Ph.D. research focuses on studying the stories of individuals who experienced death in the context of migration. He proposes that Deep Maps through the mobilization of multiple analytical and artistic displays can help understand that death is not the end of a story, but the beginning and extension of many others. Additionally, José holds a BA in Human Geography from The Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City and a Master's degree in Geomatics from CONACYT’s Research Centre of Geospatial Information. His previous academic work includes the study of everyday geographies and domestic spaces of homeless in Mexico City and new approaches to link Arts and Humanities with Cartography.

My current work is an investigation of on-line mapping (cybercartography) and its use by Indigenous peoples in the Canadian context. More specifically it examines how on-line mapping fits into narratives related to colonialization and counter mapping practices to understand what impact it may have on bridging gaps between Western and Indigenous systems of knowledge. The quantitative aspect of the work is an audit and evaluation of websites related to Indigenous mapping projects framed by the works of scholars of decolonialized methodologies. In addition to the audit my work includes interviews with Indigenous peoples involved in mapping projects, scholars, technicians, and cartographers to explore the qualitative aspects of on-line Indigenous mapping projects.

Montréal, Québec has the second-largest visible minority population in Canada at 20.3% of its population (or 760,000 people) (Statcan 2011). Despite this, “Quebec visible minorities… have for long been relatively invisible in Quebec film” (Iordanova, Martin-Jones, and Vidal 2010, 132). Outside of what is acknowledged as an “acute lack of representation” in movies (Marx, 2012), the few attempts by directors to portray people of colour in films feed particular discourses and stereotypes of minorities in Québec Cinéma. Through analysis of a selection of Quebec films, I am examining different forms of stereotypes of people of colour. My research will examine ways in which these stereotypes promote common misrepresentations and discourses about this population.

Daniel Naud is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Center on Aging, affiliated to the University of Sherbrooke (Canada), collaborating on the development of the Social Participation Potential Index, aimed at improving health and quality of life of the aging populations. Daniel Naud completed a PhD in cultural geography at the University of Montreal, Canada. He taught Geographic Information Systems and Quantitative Research Methods at Concordia University, Montreal.

Born and raised in Madagascar, Maryne has lived in Québec for the past eight years. Growing up with three cultures while speaking different languages and traveling to more than 35 countries have cultivated her passion for global environmental issues. After a Bachelor in Sustainable Development and Project Management, she has worked two years within an environmental consulting firm. She collaborated closely with environmental geographers in Guinea Conakry to develop community resilience tools, as well as Northern Québec Cree people for environmental site assessments (Phase I). Currently doing a Master of Environment at Concordia University, her main interests are participatory mapping projects and the role of open source spatial technologies (OSM,QGIS) to solve environmental and social issues. She has also developed a strong interest in remote sensing technologies as she has started a group project about the impacts of specific pesticides on watersheds in Québec (with the use of TerrSet and R). Being part of the Geomedia Lab allows her to reflect on practices related to mapping, as community or story-telling mapping among other emerging concepts.

PhD Student in Communication and Semiotics (PUC-SP). MSc in Digital Design (PUC-SP), PGDip in Information Management (UFMG) and BSc in Communications (UFMG). Member of the Peirce’s Studies International Center (CIEP/PUC-SP). Academic visitor at Geomedia Lab at Concordia University in Montréal/CA. Professional experience in knowledge management, interface design, information architecture and usability. Research interests: data visualization, information design, semiotics and cartography. Find him @danielmelo, his website and on Academia.edu

Stefanie graduated from Concordia University in 2015 with a BSc in Environmental Science. She is a currently a research assistant for the FRQSC-funded project entitled Pour une cartographie émotionelle de récits de vie, a partnership with the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. For her honors thesis entitled Nested narratives, from a life story to online mappings, Stefanie conducted a critical analysis of current online story mapping applications using one of the life stories as a case study. This critical analysis is also included in the Mappemonde publication Story Maps & Co. / État de l’art de la cartographie des récits sur Internet, and is meant as a guide for storytellers who want to map their stories in selecting which application to use.

Taien Ng-Chan is a multidisciplinary writer, artist and scholar in the Ph.D. in Humanities at Concordia University. Her research investigates everyday city life through cinema, cartography, poetry and documentary, specifically the poetics of mapping and the aesthetics of urban mobility. Taien’s website project, Detours: Poetics of the City, involved collaboration to produce site-specific digital works for interactive artist maps of Montréal, including videos to watch while riding public transit. (See Maps & Media)

Annita finished her BA in Urban Development at Sheikh Bahaei University of Isfahan and graduated from Imam Khomeini International University of Iran with a master of urban design in 2012. In her master, she focused on “Designing Pedestrian Zone in the Historical Centers of Isfahan”. Currently, she is an MSc student in the Department of Geography, Urban and Environmental Studies at Concordia University to follow her interests in urban stories, different techniques in visualization and mapping methods. In her thesis, she has concentrated on Montreal Flaneurs’ production and stories to create an atlas of the city through flanerie perspective.

Mo Wang did her Bachelor's at Sun Yat-sen University, China, and is pursuing her Master’s degree at Concordia University. Her academic interest aims to relate VGI with public health with a specific focus on studying the potential in tracking the spread of epidemic disease by using location names mentioned in the social media. In this way, she is focusing on the corelationship between Twitter place names and the Zika virus outbreak. She is also interested in geoparsing technologies.

Julia Mia is freethinking and not bound to any specific location. The world is upside down, angles are challenged and the status quo is questioned. Main point of interest are worldmaps and worldviews. This research into world maps is being conducted in collaboration with various universities and across different disciplines. Current research includes running a research project and engaging in the scholarly discourse by publishing articles in specialist journals and by participating in conferences. It is in this context that software for generating unconventional world maps was created (WorldMapGenerator.com). After much thinking and inventing, Julia Mia passed her doctoral exams in 2016.

With the development of the web 2.0, more and more geospatial data are generated via social media. This segment of what is now called “big data” can be used to further study human spatial behaviors and practices. My project aims to explore different ways of extracting geodata from social media in order to contribute to the growing body of literature interested in studying the potential of the geoweb for human geography. More specifically, my project focuses on the potential of social media to study a growing tourism phenomenon: set-jetting. Set-jetting refers to the activity whereby people travel to visit shooting locations that appear in movies. The case study focuses on the Mansfield Reformatory (Ohio, US) which was used as the shooting location for the film Shawshank Redemption (Dir. Frank Darabont, 1994). Through the analysis of georeferenced data mined from Twitter, Flickr, and Tripadvisor, my project presents and discusses the differences and similarities between the use of these three platforms by set-jetters to share and access geodata associated with an alternative tourist destination. It also provides an overview of the spatial movements of the tourists visiting these places at both global and local scales. The spatial movements of these set-jetters is then analyzed to better understand how different social media can be used to track human mobility.