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.