noterbart

Noterbart is a fictional term used in speculative fiction to describe a practice of urban documentation that blends narrative recording with data gathering. In the imagined canon where it appears, Noterbart denotes a transdisciplinary method by which residents and travelers create multimodal records of everyday spaces—notes, sketches, photographs, audio snippets, and micro-logs—that collectively map the sensory and social texture of a city. The term was coined within collaborative worldbuilding projects that explore how memory, space, and power interact in altered urban landscapes.

Noterbart practitioners, sometimes called noters, operate through informal networks rather than official agencies. They move through neighborhoods documenting sounds, textures, weather, crowd flow, and moments of public interaction. Archives are communal and participatory, kept in Noterbart Houses or digital counterparts, where entries are annotated, cross-referenced, and made accessible to the public. The aim is to preserve memory of places as experienced by diverse residents, countering top-down cartography.

In-world reception ranges from praised democratic memory-keeping to critiques concerning bias, fragmentation, and the risk of sensationalism. The practice intersects with street art, participatory planning, and cultural heritage discourses, contributing to debates about who records history and how it should be stored. Noterbart remains largely fictional, used by writers and role-playing communities to explore questions of urban memory and vernacular knowledge.