Mapping Final
Yay! It’s finished!
In Mark’s tutorial we finalised the map presentation thing, as it’ll be too hard to get a paper version working, we’re going to be sticking to the Flash map presentation and also a video that was taken over the weekend with fibre optics changing colour to show the different stages and where they got to.
But for that one we concentrated it on one e-mail that we sent just to show the path that it took.
We’ve set it out so that it looks like a web map or network map which really is what it came out as anyway, it’s also relevant as it started or is about an e-mail going places via the web.
The link for the Flash part of the mapping is: http://www.oholmwood.com/stuff/digitalmap.swf
There is also a link to the mapping results that we took on Monday it’s Mapping Results
The video with the fibre optics link is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh1_LO1akQg
What we wanted to do with this mapping project was show links between people and how far these links go i.e. you can go as far as you can geographically in a few number of people i.e. there is a theory that you can link yourself to someone else by 6 people.
In a way this has been shown by the fact that by I think 3 people we’ve got the e-mail from Plymouth to Prague, and then also to South Africa. Also it shows how far the e-mail can reach in a small space of time, we’ve also shown the web being mapped by this e-mail.
Overall I think the project went well, we got enough results to show our mapping and to display the data that we want to, everyone who forwarded the e-mail or at nearly all of them filled in the form that we sent out as part of the e-mail.
Which meant we got results back, which we were all a bit unsure about as there was no way we were able to guess if 1) anyone would participate and 2) how far it’ll go before people stopped sending it on.
As with most things you experiment there are methods that would be used the second time round which were missed when you first set it up. For instance I feel that there could have been a better way to show the links to each person, as when you get lots of replies saying they got it from Plymouth it was hard to guess who in Plymouth they got it from.
It’s not quite so bad when they are in a location that can be traceable to one person i.e. Southampton or Essex way but as was seen in the stage 2 or 3 but when you were getting results from Plymouth in the later stages we had to guess that they came from me as I live in Plymouth and all the friends bar one who I sent it to lives in Plymouth also.
I also know that some got confused or didn’t like the whole idea of the stage, and I must admit that when I first sent the e-mail on I did forget to change the stage and so had to send another one explaining it, and I’m part of the group who wrote the e-mail and thought of how to link!
Inverting Photos
For the mapping project it’s my job this weekend to turn photographs into negative so we can use them for the thermal imageing effect for the paper and digital map.
I’m going to use a variety of photos so that the rest of the group can choose which ones we want to use, and which areas of the photo’s or what colours we’re going to use to display the information.
I’ll print them all out as well as save them to my USB so that we can edit them as we choose or cut out the colours right away without having to find a printer. As there are a lot of photo’s or quite a few I’ll have to open them in word and print them from there so as to get them all on one page etc. which will change the look of it but it’s not the photo that we’ll looking at but more of the colours.
I’ve inverted all the photos’ now just need to save them and then print them out which I hope won’t take too long, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t.
Mapping Progress
The results are in, it’s time to link them!
Although we had written down the results on Monday we hadn’t yet linked them to each other, which we tackled on Friday it was a bit hard at first as we’ve all come from Plymouth, some had skipped stages and some just went to dead ends or didn’t seem to get from anywhere.
We had to re-draw again and again the links to get it just write or as close as we could get it, now that the links have been done we needed to discuss how we’d display this information.
As Mike didn’t want to see an actual map it did cause a slight problem…how could we show the e-mails?
We finally decided on a flash project showing the network of the e-mails, where they went from, and went to this would be showed in a form of lines going from one place to another with different colours to show the different stages…and where in the world they got.
We also want to show it in a physical form and not just digital, Ollie was going to be doing the flash as he was away for the weekend so Kat, Claudia and I were doing the “paper” version.
To show how many people in one area got the e-mail we’ll be using something similar to thermal imaging, because you can’t access any thermal images on the internet we’re going to have to compromise and make our own.
To do this we’ll take an image and invert it so we’ll get different colours and brightness of colours, and depending on how many of each area got the e-mail is the colour it’ll be shown on paper.
So in Plymouth if there were 6 people who got it have a brighter colour or darker whichever one we decide than say Calstock who only got 1 e-mail sent there.
It’s my job to inverting the pictures which I’ll use Photoshop to do. Kat and Claudia will be working on the link to each place. we’ll meet up probably on Monday if not before to join everything up.
Monday Mapping
We got together as a group to seive through our results, and deicde how to turn this data into a map…we got quite a few replies about 30 of them which is pretty good they all stopped around stage 6 we think.
What we’re going to do will be using string or chain to show the chains between each people, we’re trying to link them to one of us by the area and where they got it from…which is proving slightly more difficult when you have mulitple people from the same city even if it’s a different stage as some are at the same stage in the same city (i.e. Plymouth). We’ll also going to use Themal images of each city or like thermal images to show how many responses we got from each area for instance if we got 6 replies from London and only 2 from Cornwall than there’ll be more “heat” or “Thermal” in that area…around the circle of string/chain.
Don’t know what this is going to look like, but be fun and interesting to produce!
Below is the list of results we got from the e-mails.
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Stage 1 |
Stage 2 |
Stage 3 |
Stage 4 |
Stage 5 |
Stage 6 |
Stage 7 |
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Babbage,Plymouth |
Calstock (Plymouth) |
Limehouse, London (Cornwall) |
Stoke Newington, London (London) |
Hertfordshire (Prague) |
Plymouth (Plymouth) |
South Ockendon, Essex (Aveley, Essex) |
|
Peverell, Plymouth |
Plymouth (Plymouth) |
Prage (Plymouth) |
Hornchurch (Plymouth) |
Plymouth (Plymouth) |
Plymouth (Plymouth) |
Essex (Essex) |
|
St Thomas Ct, Plymouth |
Plymouth (Plymouth) |
New York (London) |
Grays, Essex (Plymouth) |
Randburg,South Africa (Amsterdam) |
Chafford Hundred, Thurrock (Aveley, Thurrock) |
|
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Gibbon Street, Plymouth |
Bristol (Plymouth) |
Bristol (Bristol) |
Grays, Essex (Plymouth) |
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South Ockendon, Essex (Aveley, Essex) |
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Plymouth (Plymouth) |
New York (London) |
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North Hill, Plymouth (Babbage) |
Plymouth (Plymouth) |
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Plymouth (Plymouth) |
Plymouth (Plymouth) |
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Norwich, Norfolk (St Thomas Ct) |
Bristol (Plymouth) |
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Essex (Plymouth) |
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Plymouth (Plymouth) |
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Eastleigh,Southampton (Plymouth) |
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Pro’s and Con’s of E-mail
The list of the pro’s and the con’s for the E-mail.
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Pro’s |
Con’s |
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Reach a lot of people |
People might delete the e-mail or not pass it on |
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No specific boundaries |
Could become over-whelmed with responses and don’t have time to map each one |
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Receivers are already at a computer |
People could be hesitate at putting down their details. |
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Fast – reach more people in less time |
Someone could alter the e-mail and change the link to an unsuitable website. |
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More people participating |
Could go to the same people, in the same area (but a pro comes from it, see 9) |
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Just have to copy and paste the e-mail don’t have to remember a note |
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Fast response from public – no waiting |
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Many ways to map out e-mail |
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See the links and connections to people. Easy to refine search on how they got to each place |
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Not just limited to MSN contacts but can use contacts from another site i.e. myspace |
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Overall we came to this conclusion:
That although there were Con’s as well as Pro’s the pro’s outnumbered the Con’s and therefore the most suitable idea to put into practise is the E-mail, it won’t take long to set up the website and type the e-mail up and send it to the relevant contacts. Hopefully we’ll receive positive results from the recipients of the e-mail so we can begin setting our map out as soon as possible.
There are various ways we could map this, which will be discussed later on in the project once we’ve got the initially stages underway.
The Fiver
Here are the pro’s and con’s of the Fiver Idea
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Pro’s |
Con’s |
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Easy to write URL on |
Will people trust a URL or look it up? |
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Map in a specific area i.e. Town or County |
Limited boundaries, likely to get repeats, probably need more detail from people. |
Scenarios
Bar: - Be given as change, the receiver will not be near a computer to type in where they got it. Then given back to the barmen in exchange for a drink and the cycle starts again. Could be too drunk to remember the URL if they looked at it at all.
Shop: - Could stay in a till for ages (not given as change) or similarly in someone’s wallet/pocket for a while. Customer may not look at the note when given the five pound.
Bank: - Someone could pass it in as cash into their bank account and then stay there for a while.
Overall we came to this conclusion:
The five pound not idea was good in theory but not very feasible, it’s relying on too many people and a good scenario to work as it involves someone looking at the five pound not and then trusting that the URL is to a suitable website.
Progrees on Mapping
As mentioned in an earlier post the group met today to go through any ideas we had and to see if we could make a decision as to what our Map project should be.
I think we had agreed that we should “track” a path of an object money, a note, a balloon or something else. So we were just talking about which object to track and how.
After the practical on Monday, Kat and Claudia went back to Kat’s and drew up a list of some of their ideas of what we could track. This was the main point of the discussion this afternoon.
Their ideas ranged from the Fiver to tracking a pint glass. These were their ideas:-
- Fiver/Coin
- Following a tour bus of a band (Reuben (well more like putting a sticker on their bus)
- A Sticker on a pint glass (see how often it got used etc.)
- A football game in the park
- Balloons
- Tagging a Cat
- Who download songs and where from
- DVD rental
All of these ideas were good and lead to many possibilites we did need to cut the list down again so we could end up with one idea that the group could all agree on, so we could start the mapping project as soon as possible.
The Ideas and their reasons for not including them are:-
Sticker on a tour bus
This would invlove us following the bus route, although it will be a map it was a bit easy to do and won’t really take a whole month to do not completely sure if this is what is required of us. But this does give a good backup plan if the choice we finally make doesn’t work out.
Sticker on a pint glass
This would be hard to track as it’ll just go back and forth from the bar and stay in the same place, which would mean it’ll be a small map of one bar area i.e. the Student Union.
A football in the park
A good idea which inspired other possiblites, but mapping the travel of the ball in a football game would result in a map with lots of lines all over the place, which would mean you couldn’t actually tell where the ball had travelled. This could however be turned to show a map of each play (for instance from the goalie back to the attackers down the other side of the pitch) and a play from the opposing team to incept then ball.
All that came from this though was me explaing the offside rule to Kat.
Balloon
There’s one big problem with this and that’s wind, if we let balloons off with messages to a website they’d be blown all over the place and may not land near someone in order for them to be tracked, let alone popping before reaching anyone. If this did happen (either popping or not landing by someone) they might not be able to be released again if their helium went.
This would leave us with a map of where each balloon went if found at all.
Tagging a cat
None of the group have a cat too tag.
Downloading songs and where from
Be hard to track by ourself, so would have to send a website to people in order for them to fill it, would it produce a map?
DVD Rental
Would have to ask the rental company if we could stick notes into their DVD covers to find out where they went and how often they were by, not sure if they’d allow us to do that so not really possible to accomplice.
After going through the list of possibility’s we managed to narrow it down to two of the best options to do the Fiver and an E-mail, to make the final decision we drew up a Pro’s and Con’s list for both ideas and added a few scenarios too.
These pro’s and con’s will follow in the next post(s)
Mapping
For this assignment we need to produce a map, and this map can be of anything, this relates to the first piece of work we had to do for this module (the one when I was in MPT) only this is the one we’re getting our mark on.
I did think that we had to stay in the same group so me and Claudia were going to be working with Matt and Chris in MPT on it, but then we were told it was something different and needed new groups. So we are now in the group with Kat and Ollie.
Ollie suggested we use coins and map a coins route, he was telling me on msn so I added a few ideas of my own.
One of which was having a coin from a different country (as I have one from America I’m used that as an example) and using the cent coin I had as an example map it’s route to England.
Such as I got it in Boston, then I went to Plymouth so had it with me, then to Springfield, Goshen, Philadelphia, New York, over the Alantic to London and down to Plymouth. I said I could find out the roads I took to each location too and if we did that from other areas have a big map of different coins to the current location in Plymouth.
Another idea was to do this in flash and have the coin move from place to place with each keyframe so that i was moving as we went along, and we produce a map with the roads lined out, and have pictures of surrounding towns next to the map or just cut out bits of maps from that area and stick them on.
Obviously this was just an idea but telling Kat and Claudia could inspire other ideas.
As that was a bit extreme another idea was formed, one which involved one coin and a map of England and Plymouth, and as the coins journey is random we use a ball covered in paint and have roll that over the maps (only acetate paper would be over it) and then that would show a map of the coin in a random order.
We suggested that to Mike on Monday and he wasn’t too keen on the idea, he didn’t say we shouldn’t do but he told us we could do something similar as it’s all down to tracking only with something else so we don’t “fake” the journey but it’ll be an actual idea.
He offered some ideas, for instance keeping the money but using a note and write a url on it or something and have people enter their location in which will then be passed back to us so we can map out that.
Leaving his tutorial we had a lot of different ideas to go on, working out which way we could do this tracking which is what we’ve sorta decided to change to as an unspoken agreement of the group.
Various ways to acheive this are:-
- Bios
- Messages
- Leaving a note on a bus seat or train seat
- Balloons with messages attached
- etc.
Each idea comes with its own problems, that as a group we’ll need to discuss.
However as we were leaving the campus Kat came up with an idea which does appear to be the best one so far, and it won’t be too hard to set up and get running, it’ll also produce a good map if it works which I’m sure it will be.
She suggested an e-mail, we send the same e-mail to our contacts on msn or something, and they send it on to their friends who also pass it on, we’d set up a website where they can enter their location (no other details needed so we won’t know anything about them) and submit it which will be sent to an e-mail we have created for this purpose and we can map out where this e-mail has got to by our contacts.
I went off and sent a few texts to some friends to see if they got an e-mail explaining what we were doing if they passed it on and I got a very positive result. Claudia liked the idea too so this may look like the map we’d do.
Talking to Kat on MSN today about this project we came up with some more ideas to expand on that e-mail idea, for instance having a different colour pin and string for each of the group and map where their e-mail got to. In order to do that we’ll have the same page with the same form on just have it sent to a different e-mail each time, and in the individual e-mails the members of the group send will have a different page to send it to the appropriate e-mail.
Personally I feel that is the best idea so far, as I think it can work and be easier to trace than money or something else as in the e-mail it’ll explain what we’re doing and also be the same on the website so people are more likely to trust it if it’s come from a friend rather than read it on the back of a fiver. As anything like that (a url on a fiver) could make people suspicous or to ignore it in case it’s a website with porn, or viruses.
