Introduction

Psychogeographical Markdown (PMD) is a custom Markdown schema for recording subjective experiences of place. It is inspired by Wilfried Hou Je Bek’s Psychogeographical Markup Language.

This is somewhere between a Markdown file template and a schema for potential advanced machine data analysis of psychogeographic experiences — I have not yet written software to do this. It does not add any new syntax to Markdown, but defines existing Markdown syntax in more specific ways.

The primary principle is to allow each file to be future-proof and polyphonic, being intuitively human-readable as a plain text file, and open for machine analysis, and producing aesthetically pleasing documents when put through Markdown parsers, without a need to change the file between those three uses.

Usage

Each PMD file collects one or more “experiences”, each of which includes one or more places, each of which contains one or more dated and timed descriptions. This nested structure allows for different psychogeographic practices and experiences to be combined and re-combined in different ways.

Umbrella experiences, places, dates, and times are set using header tags (#), and optionally the author can include precise latitude and longitude co-ordinates in a code block (>).

The main body of the text for each timed section is then plain text, describing the practice. To allow for searching later, place keywords that describe key elements of the perceptual experience of the place (“horror”, “lively”, etc., examples given below) inside Markdown single emphasis or italics marks, either _underscores_ or *asterisks*. This replaces tags in PML, retaining machine-readability.

Elements

YAML Metadata

Optional. Placed at the top of the file between two lines consisting only of ---:

Element	Description
`title`	Title of the document, which collects multiple experiences.
`author`	The psychogeographer who wrote the piece.
`tags`	Custom tags for categorizing or describing the document.

Main Text

Element	Description
`# [Experience]`	The name of the experience, which can include multiple places and times.
`## [Place]`	The name of the place of the experience, as a city or place name.
`### YYYY-MM-DD`	The date of the experience in YYYY-MM-DD format.
`#### HH:MM`	The time of the experience in HH:MM format.
`> [latitude], [longitude]`	Optional: Longitude and latitude coordinates of the experience, placed in a Markdown blockquote.
`Text.`	The body of the document where the experience is described in detail.
`_Text_`	Perceptual keywords, that are repeated across experiences and places.
`Text`	Same as above, both forms of single emphasis can be used for perceptual keywords.

Perceptions (Hou Je Bek)

The specification states that keywords indicating perceptions of place are placed within _single emphasis_ tags. Below is the list of suggested perception tags from Hou Je Bek’s original write-up:

Distinct (when a place is distinct in any way from the surroundings)
Open (the node present itself as welcoming, it seems to invite your entrance)
Close (the node present itself as not welcome to visitors)
Lively (a place seems evolving, a centre for social interaction)
Ease (a place where you feel at ease, a friendly atmosphere, positive vibes, etc)
Desolate (a feeling of being at loss)
Hectic (too many sensory perceptions)
Terror (a place that ‘expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of live’)
Horror (a place that ‘contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates’ the soul)
Stim (a point of stimulation)
Dross (a space that is ignored, a wasted space)

The user is, of course, encouraged to make their own. The choice to have these embedded inside the longer-form write-up, rather than as separate tags, is to encourage some creativity with these — although consistency will help with future analysis.

Example


---
title: "Sample PMD Document"
author: Flâneur, A.
tags: Manchester, daytime, unfinished
---
# Institutionalisation
## John Rylands Library
### 2023-12-18
#### 10:30

> 53.4800, -2.2480

Something here about how interesting going through the exhibits are.
However, I have never been able to find any actual library part of it, which makes it feel a bit _closed_.


## Manchester Art Gallery
### 2023-12-18
#### 15:45

> 53.4793, -2.2413

Something whimsical here about how great art is, but how it makes you think.
Surprisingly not hectic, with a café that brings _ease_.