I am becoming very interested in personography deriving from prosopography I think it could link virtual environments and text, especially ancient manuscripts. Merely planting textual information in VEs and VRs and Social Worlds (Active Worlds, Second Life) as alpha facing billboards is a cognitive challenge, aesthetically unpleasant and takes up valuable screen space.

But how? Partially via a more phenomenological treatment of place, virtual place, and spatial and locative audio and visual and haptic hermeneutic analysis of text. Also via text to sound or via avatars or projection (streaming video textures etc).

I have been invited to dinner by a colleague, a phenomenologist and philosopher of technology, he lent me a very interesting book.

http://www.amazon.com/American-Philosophy-Technology-Empirical-Turn/dp/0253214491 American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn [Paperback] Hans Achterhuis (Editor)

Sadly it is not very place related, but what is interesting in how it reveals no matter how carefully one attempts to discuss culture, society and technology, how difficult and temperamental it becomes. The chapters on Hubert Dreyfus and Andrew Feenberg are particularly interesting to me. It does discuss the notion of situated from Dreyfus (but not the memetic flood that arose from Dourish onwards), I just wish they would examine a little bit more closely what situated really entails.