The Norwegian Gender Equality Act of 1978 established that “women and men shall be given equal opportunities in education, employment and cultural and professional advancement” (1978:1). However, there is still a gap between women’s entry into careers historically dominated by men. Taking the example of women pursuing doctoral degrees, there are several barriers that women face when completing their dissertation and entering the job market in academia: having fewer hours to work on their dissertation due to their duties as wives and mothers, as well as the sexist attitudes of mentors (Rogg 2001, Husu 2001, Knudsen 2002). Creating quotas for women in jobs and encouraging them to enter male‐dominated professions is not enough; the very idea that women are natural carers and men are natural workers needs to be addressed through policy initiatives (Borchorst 2008). Many policies have been implemented in the Nordic countries to dismantle the obstacles that women face in their careers, and men face in caregiving.

This paper reconsiders the relationship between historical time, embodied time, and locative media. The example for this paper is the second phase of The Hollins Community Project , a locative new media installation that takes place on a trail used by former slaves of Hollins University, Virginia (USA) during the nineteenth century. The project mixes historical material with in situ virtual narratives and embodied interactions within the space to experiment with the affective and distributed aspects of narrative. An earlier phase of this project imagined the exchanges between the physical and virtual interface as a version of a memory theatre. A tagging function has since been included in the interface to explore further the temporal intensities that form up around affect and incipient narrative. Ars combinatoria , an early modern model of “tagging” (parataxic assemblage, process, and affective presence) offers a productive comparison with contemporary spatial ontologies of tagging. The paper argues for a broadened discussion of the significance of temporal affect in locative media. This work also addresses the potential in mixing historical and contemporary approaches to locative new media.