Jane's quite right, I have been busy playing with techno things.

The website has been given a bit of a facelift, now that we actually have some research materials collected to put on it.  It's still quite basic in terms of its underlying structure and appearance, but that doesn't much matter - at least it's a bit clearer to navigate now.

One of the philosophical things underpinning this project is the commitment to making the data publicly available/sharable.  This has traditionally been a bit tricky with GIS (mapping) data, but there are a number of tools out there now which make things a lot easier.  Hence on the webpage now in the 'interviews' section you can have a look at maps showing where Jane walked with the participants, based on the sat nav (GPS) tracks recorded at the time.  At some point relatively soon we'll start adding extracts from the transcripts as well - Jane's just checking over the great work that one of the Department's postgrads has done in transcribing interviews recorded in a noisy urban environment.  Incidentally, a bit of fiddling with the output levels from the mics and it has to be said that we've managed to get some amazingly high quality recordings - even with buses blasting past on Heath Mill Lane.

The maps on the webpage are based on Google Maps.  Okay, here's the geeky bit (well, this is supposed to be a record of how we actually do the research).  First I took the GPS tracks into ArcGIS - the hardcore mapping software we're using.  Then I converted the 'point' files, where the GPS records the location every 10 seconds, and made them into polylines - basically joining the dots.  These I exported as KML files - this is a file format used to exchange spatial data on the web, it's a bit like HTML in that it's a text file with a series of codes in it indicating, for example, where to put a dot on a map.  You can open KML files directly into Google Earth, but I wanted to try and embed some maps into the web page I'm making for each interview we do.  If you make KML files (and many cheap sat nav boxes can record location tracks as KML for you to download onto your computer) you can open them within Google Maps (go to Google and click 'maps').  If you put those KML files on your website, you can get Google to generate some HTML code that you can put in your own webpages which will embed the map into your page.

Simple.

Well, okay, not hugely simple.  It's a bit of a faff, but it means you can share all kinds of spatial data with people who don't have sophisticated GIS software themselves and without having to spend tens of thousands of pounds on specialist GIS web servers and licences to use Ordnance Survey data - you just put your data on top of Google's maps.

So that's what I was up to this afternoon.  Most of the days when you end the day thinking "I've earned my money today" you've been doing something really tedious.  It's nice when you've been doing something interesting and still get that feeling.

Oh and we've put links up to photos we've got from our interviewees that are being hosted on Flickr if you want to have a look.  That's the strange thing about the web these days, you don't really need a lot of storage space yourself - you can make use of other sites and simply link all the data together.  Which is kind of what Web 2.0 is really about.