Busy couple of weeks.  I'm going over to the newly rebranded Birmingham City University (formerly UCE Birmingham) tomorrow to give a talk about the project and one or two other bits 'n pieces.  An opportunity to spread the word a bit, especially among those who are more actively connected in to planning practice than ivory tower geographers.

We had an interesting meeting last week with Pete James from Birmingham Central Library.  He's library's Head of Photographs and a friend of Dan Burwood who we've hooked up with for potential collaboration.  Hopefully we'll be able to get a joint project going linking some of Dan's ideas for a project relating to community portraits along with some of the historical material that Pete can give us access to, combining these with the stories we're hoping to get from our interviewees.

On that subject, Jane's put together our project flier which we've been distributing, partly thanks to the Eastside Community Group and partly with myself and James having a quiet afternoon wandering around local pubs and leaving fliers on the bar.  It's a hard life sometimes.  Jane is hoping to hook up with a guy from the St Basil's Centre, a big homeless charity which is based out of a former church on Heath Mill Lane, deep within our study area.  So things are moving along.  Of course then comes the difficult task of deciding quite how the recording should be transcribed with all kinds of techie decisions about how to link the transcript to the GPS tracks.  Which, naturally, I'm immensely looking forward to, given my status as resident geek.

blogging, that is. 

As Co-Investigator on this project, and having been suitably shamed into action by my co-workers enthusiasm for this blogging malarkey, I though it was about time something went on here from me.  To be fair I have just moved jobs to uni of Manc, and the task of setting up and running a new Masters course in a completely new dept has eaten up the time somewhat.

So first impressions of how the project is going: 

there's lots of potential for collaboration with other people working in, on and around Eastside.  My long time friend Dan is a photographer who is working on social aspects of community in the area and has produced some amazing shots of 'life' as it unfolds in the pubs and streets of Digbeth.  Having known Dan for ages and really loving his work the potential of working together is exciting.

playing with all this technical equipment is going to raise a helluva lot of practical issues... as the others have been noting, even something as simple as recording outside, whether it is ambient noise or voices, is fraught with difficulties.  The issues raised by 10 mins in the quad at birmingham uni last week with a noise-meter could probably provide enough material for a 'how to' methods paper. (NB, no ones's saying that this would be an interesting paper. but it would be a paper nevertheless, and I'm sure there was something in the proposal about methods;)

Finally, now i have a mere 3 hours a day to kill on the train i have been able to do some reading around the new 'mobilities paradigm' and the associated field of 'mobile methodologies' within the social sciences.  I was initially excited by the possibilities of using the project to explore nomadic ethics (a la Braidotti), and the difference that moving makes to people's experience of space.  The literature I have read so far has totally underwhelmed me, as it does the classic geography trick of identifying yet another 'overlooked' object of study (in this case, mobile communities) and then applying all the same conceptual approaches to them.  nothing really new there from what i can see.... and yes I am a whinging git... we'll read some more and see whether it really does lead anywhere other than the emporer's new clothes.

so there you have it my first ever blog.  I have crumbled and joined the blogging generation.  before you know it there'll be pictures and everything.

This is evans, blogging off.

In one of the Hitch Hikers' books Douglas Adams noted the tendency among scientists to spend millions of research money and time to prove stuff that everybody already knew anyway.  And it's a staple of the Today Programme to have a chuckle at whatever the latest madness is from some American research team.

Today I feel like I've done something to join these proud ranks.  Jane & I went out with a decibel meter and recorded the noise levels at various points around Eastside.  By no means was this a comprehensive survey (we'll doubtless have to spend several days filling in the gaps), but it was enough to test the principle.  The idea was to create a contour map - like you might do for hills, but shading it in according to noise levels rather than height.

As part of the ArcGIS mapping software there's a tool called Spatial Analyst which will create contours automatically from point data - I used an Inverse Distance Weighted model.  Don't ask me what this means, because I honestly don't know.  But it produces some pretty maps, like this one:

The pinker colours show higher noise levels.  Shock horror, the High Street and area around the bus mall by Moor Street Station are noisier than wandering along the canal.  Bet you never saw that one coming.  Will have to go and survey all the cross streets along the southern side of the railway tracks - Heath Mill Lane where we walked is particularly noisy because of the buses, but others won't be.

Still, I'm feeling happier now that we're doing some of the fieldwork we told the ESRC we'd undertake.  Particularly happy that Jane is getting on with making contacts.  My head is back in teaching at the moment now that the kids are back for a new term.  Spent the last few days writing a lecture about feminist research epistemologies for the second years.  I bet they'll be as happy to hear about it as I was to write it.  Still this department has 8 female teaching staff compared to 48 men - somebody needs to say something about gender inequalities and I guess it'll be me.

Much as I love the office-based part of research (especially on a rainy day like today!), it was a real treat to get out yesterday and start meeting people!  Two important things came out of my foray into Eastside:

1)  I managed to find my way to a specific place!  Don't laugh - lots of geographers are very bad at this.  Being a rural geographer originally, I have no problem with good old OS maps in remote countryside, but maps of urban areas are often really hard to follow especially if you're on foot.  One-way streets and other things useful for drivers aren't as important as whether you can get through the end of a dead end street, where the foot bridge is or where - exactly - you can cross the park.

2) I was reminded how easy it is to slip into 'dualisms' - where something is either 'this' or 'that'.  I visited two people yesterday - one who works in and with the community and one who works in one of the newer buildings in Eastside.  It's so tempting to think that these buildings, which may have replaced historic, loved places are frequented by people who couldn't care less, but, of course, this is completely wrong.  The person I visited is very interested in, and takes care to support, local businesses and services.  She is as passionate about the local community as the rest of us.

Anyway, the search for people to interview has begun....

Part of the problem, of course, is that the equipment is essential to have some kind of rigorous test of the method.  We did some more tests with the tablet - pretty good reception around the part of Eastside around near FoE where we did a test walk.  Except, of course, for the dratted viaducts.  The new GPS seems a lot better at picking up the signal and recalculating though, which means the tracks don't wander as much after you emerge from the other side.

We also did some tests on the radio mics.  Hmm.  I pinned it to my flappy raincoat and all you can hear on the recording is FLAP FLAP FLAP with my voice indistinctly registering underneath.  Hey ho, this is why you do tests I suppose.  We'll definitely need to use the second mic to record Jane's prompts which means we'll definitely need the dual channel recorder which, you guessed it, hasn't turned up yet.

With Jane away for a couple of days I've been doing teaching-related things.  Joy to the world, good will to freshers' etc.

Can I just say that plenty of work is going on?!!  As someone new to the project, (and who didn't even know that much of this kit even existed!) there has been a lot of reading and learning to do.  In case Phil is giving the impression that this is just a project about playing with techno-toys, I have been catching up with the literature about getting 'out there' to talk to people, the use of computer technology 'in the 'field' and putting people back into GIS.  Hopefully, I can read something interesting soon....  (Didn't mean it, Phil!)  Other things to follow up are about the study area itself - hello to Digbeth and Deritend - and community type studies.  It's great to see that what we are doing has hardly been touched on before.

 

You may gather that I like the people-based stuff more, but I have to admit that walking round with the computer and GPS thingy yesterday was very interesting, and I'm really looking forward to going out and getting on with the real work of walking and talking.... 

Finally, the laptop is here.  This is a good thing for the filing cabinet in my office, which received a few more dents on Friday in my frustration at the computer salesman saying "it'll be with you Friday" and being somewhat nonplussed when I pointed out that it was already Friday.  Ho hum.

It's not a massively exciting computer, but it can be taken out in the rain without fizzling into uselessness, and this is the main thing.  Jane left me setting it up today and I spent a happy couple of hours (yes, I really am that sad) fiddling with various disks getting it to run ArcGIS, which is a piece of pretty hefty mapping software that we're going to be using for some of the field mapping and analysis.

We went out this afternoon for a quick test run.  Again, I was really impressed with the accuracy of the little GPS box we've got which connects to the laptop via bluetooth.  And Jane got the excitement of watching the arrow move around the map as we walked.  Lucky Jane.
 


Jane's got a meeting set up with a friend of Cosmic (i.e. James, the other researcher on this), who has done some cool photographic projects on Eastside.  All part of the process of getting into the community networks down there.  It finally starts to feel like we're actually going to get somewhere with the project.  Which, inevitably, means that
something else will go horribly wrong now...

Anger, frustration, irritation.  Aggghhhhrrrr.

Still waiting for the computer to turn up.  I won't name the supplier, but they are messing us about.  A lot.  Yesterday I was promised delivery today.  Today I'm promised delivery tomorrow.  We gave them the cash over a week ago.  Not impressed.

Plus all the other bits of kit we're trying to buy are stuck in an in-tray in Finance and I've had to beg on bended knee a highly stressed clerk to put them to the top of the pile for processing tomorrow.  She's being heroic over the whole thing, but I'm still left without any of the stuff

Week three is almost over and we haven't even started yet.  I could cry.  Most human geography doesn't really need any equipment and so normally we're spared this kind of thing.  I have much more sympathy with the physical scientists now, pulling their (receding) hair out over stuff not turning up, or breaking down, or simply going awol.  Whose stupid idea was it to do a gadget-laden project... oh, yeah, right.

And with only a minimum of swearing I've managed to get the project blog set up.  The idea of keeping such a blog came out of discussions in the Public Geographies Working Group over the last couple of years, where we talked about alternative writing styles and alternative ways of publishing ('public blographies', hmm).  Let's face it, only about 8 people in the world ever read your carefully crafted articles in the Journal of Obscure Studies, not least because they cost about £30 a time to download unless you happen to work for an institution that pays for a subscription.  Not exactly opening up university research to the outside world.

So the blog is here partly because of the philosophy of public geography, but it's also here to act as a field diary.  The Rescue Geography project is basically experimental - we're trying out a variety of new techniques for recording interviews in the field with people walking around familiar spaces to tell their stories about those spaces.  Various researchers have done talking-and-walking interviews before, but no one has really rigorously examined the usefulness of the technique and what methods/equipment will produce the best results.

We're now in week three of the project, which gives some indication of how disorganised I've been in terms of setting up this blog.  I was hoping to get the new 'public' website (i.e. one that isn't hosted on the University's server) up and running by now, but I'm still waiting for the new software I've ordered to turn up...

Which is one of the main points of contention, in that for various Finance-related reasons (far too tedious to go into here), we're still waiting for almost all of the equipment to actually get here.  But we do have Jane here, which is great.  She's going to be doing most of the work and I'm feeling guilty that we can't yet get her started on the fieldwork because none of the kit has arrived.

We have done some equipment tests.  Before the project started I was playing around with an Itronix hardtablet PC, but the screen visibility is a bit rubbish in daylight, the inbuilt GPS is a bit temperamental and, frankly, it weighs more than the moon.  Good if you want to hammer in nails, not so great if you want to wander around with it for extended periods.  For the project we've decided to go with a lightweight Panasonic Toughbook and a separate bluetooth GPS device.  Okay, this is where it gets incredibly geeky, this little box is basically a ceramic aerial, a GPS decoder and a little radio signal which connects it to a computer.  It uses SiRFStar III circuitry, which seems to be about as good as 'navigation grade' GPS gets.  Plus I like saying 'SiRFStar III' because it fills me with an overwhelming sense of importance - yes, probably some kind of masculinist discourse of technophilia.

The plan is to animate the GPS tracks in ArcGIS - which is basically a piece of commercial mapping software - and attach these animations to the records of people speaking whilst walking.  But we're still working out quite how we're going to do this and the extent to which we'll be using Google Earth and Google Maps to make these records publicly available.  This experimentation is kind of the point of this project really.

I've had a play at creating an animation,

using my bike ride home as an example.  It's a bit creepy watching the blob slow down slightly as I've hit an uphill bit.  Obviously this isn't real time, but I don't think anyone needs to sit through 20 minutes of a track moving very slowly across a map.  I've been thinking, actually, about getting cyclists to record their GPS tracks home, whilst narrating the route - inspired by work that Kye Askins, Duncan Fuller and others up at Northumbria Uni have been doing.  But, like so many of my good ideas, who knows if I'll actually get the time to do anything about it.