I've just arranged my fifth interview and noticed that only men have been volunteering to be interviewed! While they have all been very interesting, this is surely not going to give us a very balanced view of Digbeth and Deritend.
Or is it?
Are these areas 'for men'?
Don't you ladies visit anywhere here?
I know some of you do because I've seen you working in cafes and other businesses and providing support services. So, come on girls, tell me what you think about the places and spaces of Digbeth/ Deritend/ Eastside.
As the only girl on this project, I'd really like to talk to you.
Don't let the Spice Girls' message be in vain - let's see a bit of 'Girl Power'!
A really interesting interview with a respondent who spoke clearly, made fascinating observations and was thoughtful about his own place in Eastside.
Our aim of assessing walking interviews was also given a boost, as it appeared to me that the beginning and end of the interview 'proper' were even more blurred than usual. I usually chat to interviewees while setting up the equipment (although that used to mean a tape recorder - this project really has Equipment!), and we usually chat afterwards. Frequently, this is when the really good observations are made!! However, with a 'normal' interview there is a kind of formal ending, usually with me giving the respondent a chance to ask questions or make any other comments. In this case, though, the whole interview had been more of a chat and before we reached the end of the walk, my respondent was asking me questions about the project and my own academic background - something that usually happens 'afterwards', off-tape. Does this prove the increased informality of the walking interview - and, therefore, its value where informality is particularly useful? Or is it a one-off, dependent on the character of this one interviewee????
Yes, very interesting!
But...
It rained! And we discovered that bad weather doesn't put off all respondents!
And...
(Future employers look away now!) The audio recording failed!! Yes, I confess, I hate anything more technical than a tape recorder, and my relationship with them has been fraught on occasion! It may have been the rain, gremlins in the machinery- or, more probably, I didn't turn it on properly. Still, this interviewee did want to be anonymous , although probably not to the extent of silence....
So, learning points:
1) just looking at the weather forecast isn't enough - sometimes it is correct and you have to act on it!
Jane has just gone off to do another interview, this being the first that she's had to do while it's been raining. I feel vaguely guilty sitting in my nice warm office. Hey ho, the joys of being in charge...
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.
Yes, even though it was Saturday, a researcher's work is never done - well, that's not quite true, but this sounds more interesting!
Another fascinating walking interview discovering new streets and old histories. One place I have visited is St Basil's in Heath Mill Lane. (Soap box alert!) NB, make sure you support St. Basil's Big Sleep Out/ Sleep In (I particularly like the 'Sleep In' for those of us who have a choice about such things and like our beds) on November 30th! In talking to people who have become homeless or reading the Big Issue, I am often struck by how easy it is to lose one's home, so help prevent youth homelessness by supporting St Basil's. (Down off the soap box and back to the interview!)
As I was saying, another fascinating walk round in (fortunately) unremarkable weather and some amazingly quiet streets - away from the main roads and the Gigbeth events. I learnt about 'Dirty Deritend' not necessarily being a derogitory comment, more a factual observation, given the animals, etc. Also, while most of the stories told related to within a lifetime, right at the end we talked about the Civil War history of Birmingham. Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there....
I still need people to talk to - not all have to do a walk. I would like to do some 'normal' interviews, too, just sitting down (perhaps with a coffee - milk, half a sugar, please). So if you have been following the blog or seen the leaflets and have ANY link with Eastside (living, working, now, in the past) do get in touch.
Yes, the inaugural walking interview has been conducted! Hooray!!
The sun was shining, it was dry and not too windy or cold. This isn't just the British obsession with the weather, it may turn out to be significant in getting people to walk and talk with us - stay tuned for the final verdict in a couple of months time....
The talking bit was really interesting. This is why I wanted to join this project - to find out people's stories and histories. What this building used to be, why it is special to someone, what happened here. My mind is still putting together the stories and places.
Then, an unexpected thing happened (although that says more about me separating work and personal lives) - we stopped to talk to someone else. An old photograph had been promised, as my interviewee had links with the building now occupied by someone else. It was a really interesting few minutes for all of us, plus it demonstrates perfectly the community that some say doesn't exist in Eastside. No community? Well, I saw some today!
In fact two unexpected things happened - the other was the photographs that I was given. We have permission to use them in our project so I expect they will appear hereabouts before long (but that's technical, so I'm not doing it!). Those photos, plus the links with our photographer friend, Dan, and the archives at Birmingham Central Library look really promising for this project being an important local record.
One complaint, though - the bag with the equipment in is really heavy! I hope our project has a budget for massage or physiotherapy.... On the other hand, I really didn't notice it when we were actually doing the walking and talking - testament to how interesting it was.
Finally, are walking interviews worth doing? On the evidence of one interview - yes! I think that we followed a route that had been thought out beforehand, but still there was an occasion when we looked at a building "while we are here", so we did see things that were prompted by our being out and about.
Sadly, tomorrow's interview has been cancelled for now because of illness, but if anyone reading this thinks it looks like fun - it is! Get in touch, we still need people to talk to us.
Now, Phil's got all the techno-stuff to play with, so time for coffee.
Yes, I see them in my sleep - those green leaflets saying "WANTED: Tales, stories and histories about Digbeth, Deritend and Eastside!" Many of them are now loitering around the said areas, in cafes, pubs and, hopefully, in homes. Electronic versions are also circulating in the ether.
And - joy! - a couple of offers of help have come in! Two interviews have been arranged for next week and I'm waiting for another couple to get back to me, so its not-quite-panic-stations-but-slightly-stressing. Will the technology work? Will we be able to hear the recording? Will people turn up? If they do, will they speak? Well, yes, apart from the techno bits, I've done this before - people do usually turn up (eventually) and even the shy ones end up talking. After all, this is the best bit of the research process - actually meeting people - and I promise that it is fun for the interviewees, too. It's not often that people really do want you to talk about yourself, is it!
So, if you have read the leaflet, come and take one of us on a guided walk around Eastside. We only need another 28 people! It'll be fun - and good exercise.
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.
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.
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...
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.
, although probably not to the extent of silence....
