In January 2022, the new Faculty for Digital and Analytical Sciences (DAS) was established in Salzburg. You can find more information here.
The faculty is now being strengthened by three new interdisciplinary endowed professorships, co-financed by the state of Salzburg – including Franz-Benjamin Mocnik, who researches the communication of places. The mathematician, physicist, and geoinformation scientist combines the insights of these fields with cognitive sciences, cartography, geography, semantics, and philosophy of science. Since September 2023, he has been leading the endowed professorship for Space and Place in Information Sciences.
Description of places
Mocnik studies how places are described and conveyed, whether through maps, geographic coordinates, or subjective impressions in artworks. By combining various fields, he aims to understand how these different representations influence our relationship with places.
“Places appear in our everyday life. At the same time, they are often highly complex because many details interact. For example, why one feels so comfortable at their favorite place, such as a lake, is not easy to describe. It’s also not easy to capture with formal methods why your favorite café is exactly that one and not another, and how the waiter helps shape the atmosphere. We try to identify the characteristics and aspects that play a role in this process,” explains Mocnik.
Analysis of various representations
For his research, he analyzes both textual geographic descriptions and their representation in literature, art, and film – for example, Alfred Polgar’s description of Café Central in Vienna or the romantic image of Salzburg in “The Sound of Music” (1965). Mocnik also examines how these representations deviate from reality and how places can be conveyed in more diverse ways.
The goal of his work is to provide geographers with a tool to describe places even better – through symbols, texts, music, and sounds. “I want to find out how places and methods of communication interact, especially when we include the human-subjective component. At the moment, we don’t understand this in detail, but if we can better grasp it, this could potentially lead to a new school of thought.”
More information about the DAS Faculty at the University of Salzburg can be found here.
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