Jen Southern

I’ve been doing a bit of  consultancy for an organisation called ‘Outta Place’ in Halifax http://www.outtaplace.org/. They are going to run a series of GPS workshops in schools and I’ve been helping them out with my experience using GPS. This morning we went on a test walk with the GPS devices, downloaded our tracks and imported them to google maps. Its always good to be reminded that the translation of steps into lines and movement into drawing can be quite exciting when you first do it. The GPS as a box of tricks converts movement from one state into another. And that there’s something exhilerating in stepping onto the grass because the drawing suggests it, even if the path doesn’t.

A  Spatial Law and Policy blog that includes links to legal issues around GPS and tracking, including today: GPS tracking of workers, of new babies, and of customers to large stores by a company called Locately, and the need for real-time data.

The Centre for Spatial Law and Policy website

If tracking your dog, cat, or reindeer with GPS allows you to do spatio-temporal planning and coordination can it be called co-mobility, or would the dog, cat or reindeer also have to use GPS to monitor your movements?

“Track Dogs in Dense Cover

As often as every five seconds, your dog’s DC 40 transmits his position to your handheld, and you can see his current location and a trail of where he’s been on the Map page of your handheld. Switch over to the Dog Tracker page to view a compass pointing to your dog’s location as well as his current status: whether he’s running, sitting, on point or treeing quarry. Astro can also sound an alarm to let you know instantly when your dog goes on point.

Astro boasts a high-sensitivity GPS receiver that can track your dog’s position even in the densest cover. You can track up to ten dogs at one time with Astro, at a distance of up to seven miles away (depending on terrain). The system transmits information by line-of-sight, so it reaches farthest in flat, open territory.”

Dogs http://www.reperto.se/ Cats http://www.followit.se/trackingcats.html

There’s a contradiction about GPS that we could be surprised by its accuracy suggests that its often wrong, and yet, ‘once again’ suggests that its often accurate.

The second walk to make a track for the silk escape map I’m making, from Christ church to Sugar Lane near Bollington. About 5 miles one way.

Thinking mostly about different modes of knowing a place. Earlier this week I traced all the water from a map of this area in the process of making the main map on the silk scarf, so walking this route I recognised sections of the canal from tracing them carefully, and the water in the field near Long Lane. Walking changed my perception of the area;  in trying to recognise where a forced landing might have happened, I was seeing flat fields and wondering if they were the right ones. I’m now doubtful whether this really was the field, the account says that it happened off Long Lane, but the field I walked through was too steep for a forced landing at the Long Lane end, so the account would have said Sugar Lane if it was the site I was looking at. My understanding of the topography changed a lot when I walked, even though I grew up nearby and have walked there before, and have spent hours looking at this map. I had remembered the holly hedge, and the steep field, but not the bottom end of that path. Thinking about the differences between memory and walking reminds me of Simon Pope‘s work with walking and memory too.

I made a few blog posts, which in retrospect are not as interesting as the 30 minutes of voice memos I recorded which develop arguements and follow thoughts in a way that the blog posts don’t.

WordPress allows me to include a geotag in my blog posts, but so far it is only visible when I edit the post (see image), not on the actual blog. WordPress say that there will soon be support for making the location of posts visible on the blog.

“Where is public geo data exposed?

Geotagged posts get marked up with the geo microformat, geo.position and ICBM meta tags, and GeoRSS and W3C geodata in feeds. All of this stuff is “machine readable”, not “human readable”; it’s hidden from view.

We’ll soon be launching a bunch of human readable stuff like theme integration, widgets, shortcodes, maps, etc.

Also, geotagged posts and profiles will be searchable in the soon-to-be-launched WordPress.com Geo Search.”

from http://en.support.wordpress.com/geotagging/

Just testing the wordpress iPhone app, about to go for a walk with my new garmin gps, and to think about a proposal I’m writing.

In Cumbria last week I found several references to GPS in cards and local news – all with varying levels of frustration with different aspects of GPS as inaccurate, unreliable, misleading, gendered and un-necessary or ineffectual, in some ways reflecting what I’ve found in field work elsewhere.

Frifi is an iphone app that allows you to see where friends are and to SMS style chat with them, and find directions to them. We have been working towards adding sms or twitter style chat to our comob application, to allow for co-mobile discussion as well as location tracking within groups. I still think that our linking lines make the group a different thing. Just knowing where someone is with Frifi feels like watching them, but with a connecting line we are together in a kind of social agreement.  I haven’t used this app live with other people, although we could have done with something similar yesterday as 4 of us tried to meet up in central London, but didn’t know where to suggest as a meeting point because we weren’t sure what each other had been doing before.

http://www.frifi.net/

“The one and only phone to phone GPS contact location and free SMS Style chat app you need for the iPhone. See where your contacts are using the FriFi maps, zoom into their location and get directions to where they are. Share your location with your friends and keep up to date with places of interest they have pointed out. Drop your own pins and mark places for your friends to see, along with your own notes for them to read.Priceless for hiking, nights out, keeping tabs on the kids, sudden change of meeting place, work colleagues, festivals… you name it!”

I gave a short workshop for a group of ‘senior learners’ at Lancaster University, about my research with mapping and GPS.

I started by asking them if they enjoy navigation and pretty much all of them said that they did, which was particularly satisfying as there were more women in the room than men, and so very different from the walkers I met at the footpath society last year where many of the women (of a similar age group) said that they were no good at navigating. There was lots of lively discussion about GPS and map reading, but then right at the end someone asked the question ‘but how is this art’. I started by talking about walking and navigating as an aesthetic practice, but as a keen walker and map reader someone in the group who had worked for Ordenance Survey said that for them walking and map reading is an aesthetic practice anyway without the intervention of an artist, but for her my work was art because it was about the routes of the experience individual people rather than of general features.

As a break out discussion I asked them to list what might be postitive, negative and interesting about GPS and here’s what they came up with – (these were quick comments in note form)

Positive
Emergencies
Safety in the hills in bad weather
Freer when driving to take notice & find unexpected things
Accuracy, in journey & place, saving carbon emissions
Safety – Drivers and walkers in the right place
Time Saving- people know where they are located
Security – people feel secure in their journeys and not get into the wrong places needing external advice
reveals

Negative
Emergencies
Lack of interest in surroundings (geek)
Particularly when driving cannot differentiate between vehicles and bridges, narrow roads etc and road patterns like one way systems
Over dependency
deskilling
run out of power and need external power source
reliant on US military who could pull the plug

Interesting
Accuracy finding THE spot
EU system (Galileo) does not rely on Uncle Sam
Commericial opportunity as measure of footfall for retail operations. Series of overlays – basic map / drive times / footfall at a location
Three dimensions GPS screen but in braille representing three dimensional technology

Other comments included that GPS generates a different sense of alertness, and someone had seen research into the brains of taxi drivers and their brain connections. One participant had spent time in the north of Canada and mentioned that you can’t rely on magnetic north that close to the North Pole and that its extremely difficult to navigate in snow when there are no landmarks, so in that case and when flying GPS can be enormously useful.

more recently I was sent the paper that refers to some of these issues and concerns “Global Impositioning Systems: Is GPS technology actually harming our sense of direction?” by Alex Hutchinson that discusses some of these issues, referring to cognitive research, and wayfinding strategies of the Inuit at Igloolik.

Many of the participants were keen to help me with my research in the future, so I’m looking forward to working with them.