03.17.07
Final dollop of mapping work
Dollop.. nice word that, isn’t it? I should use it more often.
So it’s all kicking off for the mapping project this weekend. I’m not around, as I’ve buggered off home until Sunday, so we can’t work on anything as a complete group, but we met on Friday and discussed our plan of attack. We’re going for two maps, one digital, one based on paper, and I’ll be taking on the digital one while the girls will sort something out for the paper-based one. I think they’re going to print out a large UK map from digimap on some sheets of A4, and pinpoint all of the inidividual email recipients and utilise a kind of thermal imaging system, where the most popular areas such as Plymouth and Essex will be hottest, and places like Bristol and Norwich will be cooler to certain amounts. I think that map will be less concerned about linking people up along the chains, but I’m not sure yet. I did hear talk of the use of strings and stuff.
My digital map, which will be made into a flash animation, is less concerned about pinpointing exact locations on a map, although distance is measured, the chains are illustrated in more of a branching tree style of doing things, similar to how maps of the internet are presented. I looked at Cyber Geography and found images like these quite interesting..
And particularly the kind of stuff on this site.
They’re maps of cyberspace, as messages travel through servers and things, and that’s sort of what my map will be presenting. Here’s a Photoshop image of what I have so far, and I’ll make this into a snazzy Flash animation this afternoon…
The seven stages that our replies extended to are colour coded, starting from red into purple, blue, green, yellow, etc. Stage 1, which is us four group members, extends out from the central point towards the four corners, and this is a bit like the seperation of people or ideas in a family tree or brainstorm diagram. Our following chains will extend out seperately into the four corners of the image, even if say I have someone from Bristol in my chain and Vicky has someone in Bristol on hers, they don’t appear in the exact same spot on the map because it’s more concerned with how the chains branch out and separate. It does however, vaguely measure distance, as the solid lines relate to how far the email has travelled across the country to appear in that persons inbox. The occasional deviancy of the lines as they take sudden turns on their route to the next person represents the different servers and junctions the electronic signals are changing at, in order to get there. It’s by no means completely accurate, but adds to the whole digital, cyberspace style thing, and makes it more interesting to look at, if nothing else. The dashed lines represent travel across countries, as we had a few responses from places like New York and Prague, and purely to make it easier to view, their distance is not to the same scale as the solid, UK lines are.
It’s quite abstract, which is what I think we’re supposed to come up with. I’ll see what my fellow group members think about it, and as I say, I’ll adapt it into a Flash animation with growing lines and maybe rollover places names to make it easier to see which point is which.
For good measure, here’s some workbook stuff, including notes we made about linking people up and a rough idea I sketched out for my flash map.
