Our email mapping project, where we’ve been receiving responses all week about the chain email we sent out last monday, has been going well. We made the “closing date” yesterday and got a total of 36 responses within the week, so that’s pretty good. Now we have one more week to sort through the data and create a map, maybe two actually, about it.

Our email responses.

The contents of a response.

A table of all of the locations of everyone who responded, plus the location of the person they recieved the email from.

Some thinking I did about how the map might look.

Yesterday, we looked at the results together, and made a list of everyone’s location and the location of the person who sent them the email. Using the stage numbers they filled in, it was possible to link up some people fairly easily, which Claudia and I attempted to do today, but there are many people for whom it’s going to be really hard to link up, as can be seen in the spreadsheet above, put together by Kat. There are an awful lot of Plymouth’s and in many cases, people haven’t been specific enough about the locations, so it’s impossible to know for sure who sent it where, for some. Particularly in the later stages. Perhaps this is a fault with how we organised it, and might have been better if we risked breaking fairly invisible confidentiality concerns and asked for emails, so we could at least link them better. Still, we’re pleased with the amount of responses we’ve receieved.

We’ve been discussing how we’re going to present it and we seem to be going for two alternate maps. One based in Flash that shows a branching series of lines, depicting the chains that reach out to different areas of the country, colour coded according to the stages, much like some depictions of the internet. Another is an actual, physical map of the country,  probably Digimap printouts, using pins and strings and stuff to mark out the locations. Not sure about that one, but we’ll discuss more soon, and start to build it.