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.

I’m going to be working with Kat on the mapping project for IDAT101, due in next month, and we’ll be starting a whole new thing, as opposed to me carrying on with what I originally started with Kane, Steve and Matt at the start of the last term.

While out for a walk yesterday I had a few thoughts about some ideas. First of all I considered something that maps time, rather than distance, in some way. Perhaps a map of one area, and the movement of birds across that area is charted, or we could do it with people walking around the Plymouth city center, although that’s a bit iffy. Then the idea hit me that any given coin or money note can travel around a city or even a country as it changes hands from person to person, and it might be interesting to chart this, drawing arrows between the marked points at which a hypothetical coin changes hands. Obviously it would be too hard to track a real coin. We could have several different maps, say of Plymouth, the South West and the UK, and use overlay sheets to add more points or possibly even more coins.