You can tell it's term time in Birmingham, while University of Manchester are in the middle of their exam period.  I have been somewhat frantic over the last couple of weeks while James has been largely sitting at home playing with Facebook and generally being able to get through the day without running between teaching and endless meetings with students.

The meeting with MADE prompted me to finally get around to upgrading the website, which I'd built with HTML as it was written circa 1994 - functional but not exactly pretty.  The web design software I'd ordered in September turned up toward the end of last term and I only got around to learning how to use it a few weeks ago.  Anyway, I sat down last weekend and moved everything into a new template and even spent some time learning XML in order to create a database to work underneath the interview page.  Very dull, but I was pretty pleased with myself.  At least our web presence is a little more professional looking now.

Warning, this next bit gets very techie.

Faffing around with HTML (page layout code), XML (database code), KML (mapping code) and other computery things has brought me back to thinking about solving the problem of presenting the interview transcripts.  (Yes, I know, they're still not on the website, in spite of many promises!)  I woke in the middle of the night last week thinking I can do this by creating HTML tags in Microsoft Excel (which is where we've got the transcript text, broken into 10 second chunks to match the GPS log), then using ArcGIS to connect the HTML text and the GPS points and export it as a series of formatted text balloons in a Google Map. Then I could set up an animation to run through each balloon in turn to allow people to 'listen' to the transcript in its location. Yes, my dreamscape is filled with such excitement.

Well, it turns out I'm not quite right about this because of the way I've been exporting the GIS data into the Google Earth KML format.  The script I've been using doesn't cope well with HTML tags as it tries to rewrite them into a different format to work with KML and doesn't quite manage this.  So I think I'm going to have to consult with friend, colleague and GIS-genius Lee Chapman to see if he can tell me how to write scripts in Visual Basic to run in ArcGIS.  This scares me quite a lot...

Less techie stuff now.

Anyway, what I have managed to achieve this week is to create a new map (available on the Downloads page of the site) which allows you to click on locations within Eastside and hear a minute worth of ambient sounds recorded at that location.  I did the recording this Thursday, which was a beautiful crisp, cool winter day with no rain.  I wanted to get workday sounds, hence why I cycled madly into town on a weekday in an unexpected gap between two meetings.  I'll confess that I haven't made a fantastic job of the recordings - slowly working out how to use the new audio recorder.  Most of the recordings were too quiet and I had to artificially amplify them (which has made some of the quieter ones a bit 'fizzy'), hence I may go and do them again at some point.  Still, the stereo microphone works really nicely - it's quite eerie listening to them with headphones on, because they do give a really strong sense of space.

The next thing to do is something similar but with a first edition Ordnance Survey map and pop up balloons with historic photos from the Central Library.  But that's not going to happen just yet.  I haven't actually had a day off in the last two weeks and I really, really need some sleep.  I'm going to get some teaching stuff ready for Monday now, then go to the cinema and probably doze off...