When we had the lunchtime meeting with MADE that James has blogged about, I mentioned a project that the World Bank have been funding in the Congo. Essentially locals are given ruggedised handheld computers with a very simple interface whereby they can record the location of certain areas which they value in different ways. The data gathered can then be used to inform activities in the area by outsiders (particularly logging).
I mentioned this to Julia because it occured to me that we could do something similar for the Eastside Laboratory, setting up some PDAs so that participants can go out and do some simple mapping without having to be taught how to use GIS software.
Steph from MADE had already put me onto Mediascapes and I've been playing with it a little bit. It has the advantage of not taking up a lot of memory and being free to download and install - it even works with mobile phones if you've got a particularly flash one. So, having spent the weekend finishing off my marking, I settled down earlier this week to play with the software.
Basically you can write your own 'mediascapes' which people then download and 'play' on their own devices. You need a little bit of knowledge of scripting using Java which, frankly, I don't have, but figured out enough to get something basic working. Essentially I had a little map on the screen of the Eastside area and a little man walks around the map as you walk around following you using GPS. I programmed the mediascape to record all the GPS locations and also record every time you press the up or down button on your handheld computer. Up and down could be used to stand for anything that you want people to record (happy/sad, safe/scared, interested/bored), but I decided to try out 'like/dislike'.
So on Thursday James & I went down to Eastside because we were hooking up with Steph who is project managing us at MADE. We dragged Steph out of the office - since she put me onto the Mediascapes software in the first place - and made her our guineapig logging the areas she likes and dislikes in Eastside. This map is the result of her walk around the area.
It's quite an interesting exercise, though if you only have one person doing it, it becomes a bit arbitrary. What is it that has made one area particularly likeable and another not. I took the log file from the Mediascape and put it into my GIS over lunch and got Steph to discuss why she'd logged in certain ways in certain areas. Which is fair enough, but as James pointed out, it would be kinda interesting to get, say, a hundred people to do this and then you could start to identify broader patterns of likes and dislikes (or whatever else you asked people to record).
Certainly Steph reported that it was a very easy exercise to undertake. In fact she was doing it as we were walking along talking about the project and also stopping every now and again taking decibel readings to add to our background noise map. It would certainly be an interesting thing to do with groups wandering around.
We subsequently had another meeting with Ken Mossman and also Nick Bird from ISIS on Friday morning and showed them this exercise. As Ken pointed out, there are issues about precisely what people are looking at when they log a particular feeling, but there are ways around this. One could use a helmet mounted camera to record video footage of where a participant was looking, or even use a device with an inbuilt camera to ask people to take pictures of things they like/don't like. Still, it's an interesting principle to have established and it will be quite nice to do something more with this.