Dale Leorke
Biographic Data
| ID | 360860 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dale Leorke |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dale |
| FAMILY NAME | Leorke |
| SIGNATURE | LEORKE D |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8741-1758 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Campus, collections, and the student: A spatial ontology of the university library
This article develops a framework for understanding the evolving spatial ontology of the contemporary university library. We conceptualise the library in three overlapping ways. First, as a material anchor of campus life and a metonym for the university’s identity; second, as a site where the fixity of collections intersects with the mobility of students, knowledge, and digital infrastructures; and third, as a spatial manifestation of how univers…
Play as a Method: Positionality, Power, Possibility
The institutionalisation of play is well documented, but less attention has been paid to what happens when play becomes not only an object of study, but a way of doing research. This article explores the methodological and ethical complexities that arise when play is used as a research method within academia, where it becomes entangled with the personal, institutional, and political dynamics of scholarly life. Blending theoretical reflection, aut…
Playful, portable, pliable interventions into street spaces: Deploying a ‘playful parklet’ across Melbourne’s suburbs
A parklet is a small, relocatable public space installed onto kerb-side car-parking spaces. This article examines the evolving design, programming, approval process and reception of a ‘playful parklet’, available for free public use, which was transformed and relocated between four urban contexts in Melbourne. It demonstrated a creative, collaborative placemaking approach involving artists, game-makers, researchers, residents and local government…
Playing in the “Third Place”: How Games and Play Are Transforming Public Libraries
Games and play are a growing presence in public libraries, part of a suite of new spaces and services that respond to digitization and new urban policy imperatives. Drawing on observation of library spaces and interviews with library staff in Australia, Finland, and Singapore ( n = 27), we examine the myriad ways games and play are transforming the library: from its architectural design and furnishings to its daily rhythms, atmosphere, and acoust…
From ‘pop-up’ to permanent: Temporary urbanism as an emerging mode of strategic open-space planning
Pop-up parks have emerged alongside other forms of temporary urbanism as low-cost, informal, community-engaged interventions that address pressing community needs. This article examines four pop-up parks in Australian cities (Melbourne, Sydney and Perth) that reappropriated street space for pedestrians and eventually became permanent. The article charts the developmental trajectories of these four projects, drawing on local planning documents, in…
Augmented play: An analysis of augmented reality features in location-based games
As well as popularising location-based games, Pokémon GO helped connect location-based play with augmented reality (AR), bringing this still-nascent technology into the mainstream. Despite growing use of AR, its long-promised revolutionary potential remains stifled by limited innovation, technical barriers and lack of uptake by users. To explore how AR figures into location-based games, we analysed 11 location-based games with AR features. We ide…
Post-casual Play: Affect, Demand and Labour in Digital Gaming
This article examines the concepts of “casual” and “hardcore” games in order to complicate the distinctiveness of these categories. While casual games have become a significant boon to the games industry, radically reconfiguring the composition of its audience, financial models and aesthetics, hardcore approaches to play are increasingly evident in games typically designated as “casual”. Meanwhile games targeted at a hardcore audience of players …
Openness in Practice: Understanding Attitudes to Open Government Data
Openness in Practice: Stakeholder Attitudes to Open Government Data
Platformisation in game development
This article draws on case studies of two software development platforms, Unity and Twine, to unpack how the game development process both adheres to and challenges understandings of ‘platformisation’
Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City
This book explores what games and play can tell us about contemporary processes of urbanization and examines how the dynamics of gaming can help us understand the interurban competition that underpins the entrepreneurialism of the smart and creative city. Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City is a collection of chapters written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from game studies, media studies, play studies, architectu…
Location-Based Gaming: Play in Public Space
Location-based games emerged in the early 2000s following the commercialisation of GPS and artistic experimentation with ‘locative media technologies. Location-based games are played in everyday public spaces using GPS and networked, mobile technologies to track their players location. This book traces the evolution of location-based gaming, from its emergence as a marginal practice to its recent popularisation through smartphone apps like Pokémo…
“More than just a library”: Public libraries in the ‘smart city’
Issue 29 Introduction: Computing the City
Ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things are often referred to as prime examples not only of new modes of computing, but of a new paradigm of mediation itself.If Lewis Mumford could already ascribe key characteristics of media -such as storage and transmission -to the city, so the city could in itself be understood as a medium (see Kittler, 1996), then nonetheless something changes considerably once 'the city itself is turning into a const…
The Struggle to Reclaim the City: An Interview With Michael Sorkin
The potential for citizens to reclaim and reappropriate the physical spaces of their city has garnered a great deal of attention over the past year or so. The Occupy movement, “Arab Spring,” and various social protest movements around the world have all reinvigorated debates over the political importance of public space. These movements posit an alternate historical trajectory to the one depicted by urban theorists and sociologists over the past …
Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces
Mobility and Locative MediaMobilities has become an important framework to understand and analyze contemporary social, spatial, economic, and political practices.Especially as mobile media become seamlessly integrated into transportation networks, navigating urban spaces, and connecting with social networks while on the move, researchers need new approaches and methods to bring together mobilities with mobile communication and locative media.Mobi…
From the cybercafé to the street: The right to play in the city
Historically, the play of digital games in public was restricted to certain locations such as arcades and cybercafés. The proliferation of personal, mobile, and digitally networked devices, however, has contributed to the ubiquity of digital games in contemporary culture, making them available for play anywhere, any time. This paper uses two examples to examine this recent shift to consider how play and digital games can contribute to revitalisin…
Ideology, obsolescence and preservation in digital mapping and locative art
The city has long been evoked as an environment for critiquing traditional paradigms of place, space and urban dwelling. This article engages with two related forms of urban mediation that arose during the late twentieth century in response to the proliferation of networked, mobile and location-aware technologies: locative media art and digital mapping. These practices emerged by taking advantage of the widespread availability and dissemination o…
Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces
Mobility and Locative MediaMobilities has become an important framework to understand and analyze contemporary social, spatial, economic, and political practices.Especially as mobile media become seamlessly integrated into transportation networks, navigating urban spaces, and connecting with social networks while on the move, researchers need new approaches and methods to bring together mobilities with mobile communication and locative media.Mobi…
From ‘pop-up’ to permanent: Temporary urbanism as an emerging mode of strategic open-space planning
Pop-up parks have emerged alongside other forms of temporary urbanism as low-cost, informal, community-engaged interventions that address pressing community needs. This article examines four pop-up parks in Australian cities (Melbourne, Sydney and Perth) that reappropriated street space for pedestrians and eventually became permanent. The article charts the developmental trajectories of these four projects, drawing on local planning documents, in…
From the cybercafé to the street: The right to play in the city
Historically, the play of digital games in public was restricted to certain locations such as arcades and cybercafés. The proliferation of personal, mobile, and digitally networked devices, however, has contributed to the ubiquity of digital games in contemporary culture, making them available for play anywhere, any time. This paper uses two examples to examine this recent shift to consider how play and digital games can contribute to revitalisin…
Ideology, obsolescence and preservation in digital mapping and locative art
The city has long been evoked as an environment for critiquing traditional paradigms of place, space and urban dwelling. This article engages with two related forms of urban mediation that arose during the late twentieth century in response to the proliferation of networked, mobile and location-aware technologies: locative media art and digital mapping. These practices emerged by taking advantage of the widespread availability and dissemination o…
The Struggle to Reclaim the City: An Interview With Michael Sorkin
The potential for citizens to reclaim and reappropriate the physical spaces of their city has garnered a great deal of attention over the past year or so. The Occupy movement, “Arab Spring,” and various social protest movements around the world have all reinvigorated debates over the political importance of public space. These movements posit an alternate historical trajectory to the one depicted by urban theorists and sociologists over the past …
Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces
Mobility and Locative MediaMobilities has become an important framework to understand and analyze contemporary social, spatial, economic, and political practices.Especially as mobile media become seamlessly integrated into transportation networks, navigating urban spaces, and connecting with social networks while on the move, researchers need new approaches and methods to bring together mobilities with mobile communication and locative media.Mobi…
Issue 29 Introduction: Computing the City
Ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things are often referred to as prime examples not only of new modes of computing, but of a new paradigm of mediation itself.If Lewis Mumford could already ascribe key characteristics of media -such as storage and transmission -to the city, so the city could in itself be understood as a medium (see Kittler, 1996), then nonetheless something changes considerably once 'the city itself is turning into a const…
“More than just a library”: Public libraries in the ‘smart city’
Location-Based Gaming: Play in Public Space
Location-based games emerged in the early 2000s following the commercialisation of GPS and artistic experimentation with ‘locative media technologies. Location-based games are played in everyday public spaces using GPS and networked, mobile technologies to track their players location. This book traces the evolution of location-based gaming, from its emergence as a marginal practice to its recent popularisation through smartphone apps like Pokémo…
Platformisation in game development
This article draws on case studies of two software development platforms, Unity and Twine, to unpack how the game development process both adheres to and challenges understandings of ‘platformisation’
Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City
This book explores what games and play can tell us about contemporary processes of urbanization and examines how the dynamics of gaming can help us understand the interurban competition that underpins the entrepreneurialism of the smart and creative city. Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City is a collection of chapters written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from game studies, media studies, play studies, architectu…
Openness in Practice: Understanding Attitudes to Open Government Data
Openness in Practice: Stakeholder Attitudes to Open Government Data
Post-casual Play: Affect, Demand and Labour in Digital Gaming
This article examines the concepts of “casual” and “hardcore” games in order to complicate the distinctiveness of these categories. While casual games have become a significant boon to the games industry, radically reconfiguring the composition of its audience, financial models and aesthetics, hardcore approaches to play are increasingly evident in games typically designated as “casual”. Meanwhile games targeted at a hardcore audience of players …
Augmented play: An analysis of augmented reality features in location-based games
As well as popularising location-based games, Pokémon GO helped connect location-based play with augmented reality (AR), bringing this still-nascent technology into the mainstream. Despite growing use of AR, its long-promised revolutionary potential remains stifled by limited innovation, technical barriers and lack of uptake by users. To explore how AR figures into location-based games, we analysed 11 location-based games with AR features. We ide…
Playful, portable, pliable interventions into street spaces: Deploying a ‘playful parklet’ across Melbourne’s suburbs
A parklet is a small, relocatable public space installed onto kerb-side car-parking spaces. This article examines the evolving design, programming, approval process and reception of a ‘playful parklet’, available for free public use, which was transformed and relocated between four urban contexts in Melbourne. It demonstrated a creative, collaborative placemaking approach involving artists, game-makers, researchers, residents and local government…
Playing in the “Third Place”: How Games and Play Are Transforming Public Libraries
Games and play are a growing presence in public libraries, part of a suite of new spaces and services that respond to digitization and new urban policy imperatives. Drawing on observation of library spaces and interviews with library staff in Australia, Finland, and Singapore ( n = 27), we examine the myriad ways games and play are transforming the library: from its architectural design and furnishings to its daily rhythms, atmosphere, and acoust…
From ‘pop-up’ to permanent: Temporary urbanism as an emerging mode of strategic open-space planning
Pop-up parks have emerged alongside other forms of temporary urbanism as low-cost, informal, community-engaged interventions that address pressing community needs. This article examines four pop-up parks in Australian cities (Melbourne, Sydney and Perth) that reappropriated street space for pedestrians and eventually became permanent. The article charts the developmental trajectories of these four projects, drawing on local planning documents, in…
Campus, collections, and the student: A spatial ontology of the university library
This article develops a framework for understanding the evolving spatial ontology of the contemporary university library. We conceptualise the library in three overlapping ways. First, as a material anchor of campus life and a metonym for the university’s identity; second, as a site where the fixity of collections intersects with the mobility of students, knowledge, and digital infrastructures; and third, as a spatial manifestation of how univers…
Play as a Method: Positionality, Power, Possibility
The institutionalisation of play is well documented, but less attention has been paid to what happens when play becomes not only an object of study, but a way of doing research. This article explores the methodological and ethical complexities that arise when play is used as a research method within academia, where it becomes entangled with the personal, institutional, and political dynamics of scholarly life. Blending theoretical reflection, aut…
Computer Science (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Business (7 works) · Political science (6 works) · Digital Games and Media (5 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Architectural engineering (4 works) · Engineering (4 works) · Geography (4 works)