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.