In the hope of getting things moving, this weekend I went ahead and pretty much built up the webpage aspect of our mapping project; the site which recipients of our chain email will be directed to, and they are asked to fill in a short form, which is then sent to an email address so we can find out roughly where they are located, without them having to disclose these details to other people in the chain, etc.

I was going to purchase some web space of my own for other personal projects anyway, so now seemed a good time to do so so that we could also use it for this project. On Thursday we agreed that it might be a good idea to send out two different chain emails. One on a smaller scale, which required sufficient details that we could actually link specific senders to recievers and construct the chains, and another that simply asks for the person’s location, and allows them to send the email to as many people as they want. This one will measure how the email spreads across the country over time. As we can’t be certain how many responses we’ll get back, it does seem like a good idea to try both ideas and see what works best, or maybe use both in the end.

The webpages are now online here and here respectively. Don’t submit anything though please, as you might screw up our results! After running through a bit of form validation in javascript, a nifty formmail cgi (or something like that) script already on the server sends off the results to an email address under my domain, which in turn forwards it to our group email address set up for this project, idatstudents@hotmail.co.uk which we can all access. The date on the emails that we recieve there will indicate when the forms were filled in. We can then gather all this data and present it on a map of some sort.

I guess I got a bit carried away with it though. I wanted to get it all ready and working perfectly in time for Monday so that we just needed to fine tune it according to group decisions, and then compose the email together and get things going, because until now it’s all just been theoretical. I should have let my fellow team members know a little more about what I was doing though, and when I showed them what I had done in an MSN conversation earlier today, Vicky and Kat were, understandably, a bit upset that I had decided to go ahead and do it by myself, and we found that not everyone was clear on certain aspects of what we were doing. I take responsibility for that and apologised, but we agreed now that we would ensure everyone is kept perfectly up to date with what’s going on in the project and knew exactly what each member was doing if they had to do individual work. I think we’ll produce some better quality stuff as a result.

Sorry, guys! Won’t happen again.

We’re a little clearer on what we’re doing now with our email mapping project, and Mike seems to like it. Essentially, we’re going to send out an email just to one person (or possibly five). That email will contain a URL to a small page we’ll put up, and instructions to forward the email to five of their closest friends, so we create a chain email that spreads out across many different people. The URL will contain a short form which participants will have to fill out and submit to our email address so we can track them, including where they live, and where the person who sent them the email lives (in order to identify who is linked to whom). A number will also be written in the email, which identifies the stage at which the person is in along the chain, so it’ll be 1 when we first send it. When they forward the email, they need to add 1 to that number, and the form will also allow them to tell us which number is written in the email they recieved.

From all this information, we can determine exactly where the email goes across the country, and by combining the stage number and sender location for each recipient, we can link people together. There are a few problems, mainly regarding how likely people will want to respond to us, so we need to keep the things we’re asking them to do to an absolute minimum. Secondly, we’re identifying people by where they live (only as far as city or district) in order to ensure privacy of their information, and not asking them to give us names or email addresses. If multiple people in a single stage live in the same place, it’s going to be alot harder to determine which one sent it to certain people in the following stage. We may also get joke responses and plenty of cases where the chain goes dead, but the further out it goes, the more people will read it, so this balances out the fact that they’ll be more likely to ignore it as they won’t know us.

As far as actually mapping it out goes, we haven’t really decided yet. We could use google maps or another free mapping site that allows you to place markers in specfic places, so we could gradually build it up, or use an actual, physical map.

I was away for a few days this week for a funeral, and in my absence my fellow group members have gone ahead and discussed things to do with the mapping project without me. So I could say we, but the truth is they decided that mapping the exchanges between people of a £5 note was prone to several things that would make it difficult for us to recieve enough results for. Within the month and a half we have to do this, the fiver may not necessarily be exchanged often enough, as it’ll spend much time in the posession of shops before being given out as change, and probably won’t go very far across the country. Furthermore, people not trusting the URL that’s written on it, or ignoring it, or not being able or bothered to go to the site are all likely things that could happen for each person who gets it. I agree with all of that, but I reckon it could still be quite fun to do, and it doesn’t really matter so much what we get back; the concept is the important thing, which I really like.

The girls have come up with another idea though that is simpler, and is much more likely to get us some results. Maybe I’ll try that £5 note idea myself sometime then. Anyway, as far as I can gather, we’re going to send out an email to everyone we know, asking them to forward it to as many people as possible, and it gets sent on as a chain letter. In the email, we add a URL that takes each recipient to a small form, and they can tell us where they are in the country and maybe any other stats we could use. It’ll be hard to find out, and then work out some sort of system that shows who sent it to who else and where everyone is in the chain if the numbers of people amount to hundreds and hundreds, but I reckon time is quite a good identifier of this, assuming people check their emails on a near daily basis. On a map, it could be interesting to see at what points in time the email emerges in particular areas of the country. This could be possible if you identify each person with a marker that’s coloured according to the day on which we recieved their response on the site. Mike suggested we could use Google Maps or some sort of mapping site, as the way in which it’s presented isn’t as important as the actual concept. Whatever we use, it’ll have to allow us to place markers in a variety of colours, or at least some way of easily showing the day in which each person receieved the email.

In an MSN conversation with Vicky this afternoon, I suggested the idea of creating a boundary in that each person is only allowed to pass the email on to people they know who live locally. This should create a slowly expanding circle around Plymouth, where the later on in the experiment you receieve the email, the further away from Plymouth you’re likely to be. This simulates any object that can be personally passed between individuals, so we’re no longer really mapping the geographical progress of an email but how posession of an object slowly spreads out in an area. Eventually, we agreed it was better to remove this boundary and let people send it to whoever they want around the country, predicting that these kind of circles would naturally emerge around cities and particular places anyway, because most people will have plenty of local friends that they would send it to, without really needing that boundary to ensure they do so. Its removal allows it to spread to any number of other places in the country, allowing more “circles” to emerge. Or we could just end up with a massive array of dots across the whole country, all differently coloured, with no correlation whatsoever. But even if that were the case, it would still be pretty interesting to find that that’s actually what happened, compared to this prediction. All a bit complex at the moment, but we’ll sort it all out on Monday.

We also briefly discussed site hosting and technical bits. It’ll be a simple form in which people can tell us where they are, as specifically as they want to divulge. This is sent to an email address that we’ll set up and we can find out the day and time they recieved the chain email by reading the date on the email that the form sent to us. Of course, that’s prone to the person not checking their emails daily, or not responding immediately, but if we keep the whole process simple enough, I think it’ll be fairly accurate. We could go with a free site host, but I was planning on buying some personal webspace soon anyway, so we could use that, which would be more reliable. Don’t know if I want my domain name passed around to everyone though so I guess we could get a cheap domain name just for this project and apply it to a directory within the site. We’ll see.

Fresh off of one of Mike’s tutorial sessions, our mapping project has been given a thorough re-thinking, and I think we’re onto a much better idea now.

It’s very much the same concept; tracking the routes of objects, such as coins, that get passed from person to person across the country, but instead of using a completely hypothetical coin and making up a journey for it, we track actual objects. We thought about doing this before but decided it would be too hard to do so, without really exploring it much, to be honest. We discussed several ideas in the tutorial today though, including creating a small website that outlines what we’re doing and presents the user with a short form to fill in. We write the URL on the object, a five pound note for example, and they use the form to tell us where they are and where they got it from, and we can plot their locations on a map, creating a real route for the object to have travelled to, based on what people tell us.

To ensure we get as much bask as possible, we can use multiple objects, and other possibilities we discussed include pens, balloons, seats on a bus.. we could use anything that gets passed around alot, and can be written on. There are lots more to be considered, such as how likely someone would be to trust a strange URL and not believe it to contain viruses or something offensive, and measures to keep their privacy safe, but I really like this idea in general, and think it’s alot more interesting than what we were going to do.