Timeline is an open source project that allows you to create a HTML5/jQuery timeline from a set of data. It is powerful enough to accept JSON as a data source, but it also works straight off a google docs spreadsheet. Play around with the included templates, and you get a clean looking [...]]]>

Timeline is an open source project that allows you to create a HTML5/jQuery timeline from a set of data. It is powerful enough to accept JSON as a data source, but it also works straight off a google docs spreadsheet. Play around with the included templates, and you get a clean looking slide show with a time control beneath.

Check out the user interface timeline.

It appears to work well with twitter, youtube, flickr and a few others. I’m planning on playing around with this as a way of communicating some of the qualitative data I’ve collected over the last year or so. It’s a shame there’s no interface (beyond a google spreadsheet) for building your own timeline; I imagine this to be a very powerful story-telling tool if provided to the right people, and with easy access to the media objects they care about. Of course, some kind of location integration would be nice too.

As a side note: I find it really interesting that even something that’s been traditionally technically inclined – like an open source project – uses phrases like “beautifully crafted” and “intuitive to use”. Does it represents a shift of focus towards user experience and design, or is it just a healthy dose of Apple-isms? 

At the start of the year,Reuben and I decided to finally start working on some ideas we’ve had for a number of years. We’re both working on PhDs that overlap in strange and mysterious ways, and we think we know a bit about solving those particular problems now.

So, we [...]]]>

At the start of the year,Reuben and I decided to finally start working on some ideas we’ve had for a number of years. We’re both working on PhDs that overlap in strange and mysterious ways, and we think we know a bit about solving those particular problems now.

So, we started a company. We’re working on our first OSX application that aims to solve some of the problems we’ve come across in our research, and somehow, amongst all the phd writing, we’re making steady progress.

If you’d like to be kept up to date, check out our website or follow our twitter account (@pprgiant).

This is a quick post to break the drought here, and to let the world know that I have been working. The above picture is from Scrivener – my writing program of choice – showing the word target for my literature review. Writing this has been enjoyable so far (sort of), and has [...]]]>

This is a quick post to break the drought here, and to let the world know that I have been working. The above picture is from Scrivener – my writing program of choice – showing the word target for my literature review. Writing this has been enjoyable so far (sort of), and has caused me to rethink and rework much of the approach I’m taking to the thesis overall. I’ve been doing lots of reading on human geography, and that topic will take up much of the remaining 4000 words.

The general gist of the literature review: Spatial concerns like distance, time and “place” (the social interpretation of a location) have been seen as things to overcome and solve through technology. But what if (like in human geography), we saw them not as something to solve, but as things to embrace? How does that change the way we approach new technologies?

Also, I find it pretty amusing that a 12,000 word document no longer scares me.

People have connections to them; they influence us as much as we influence them.

My university (and supervisor) are great at encouraging and pushing their graduate students to write and publish [...]]]> To curb off a bit of the ol’ thesis anxiety, I thought I’d make a list of things-I-did this year. In no particular order, here are the things I liked (and possibly didn’t) this year.

Writing/Talking

My university (and supervisor) are great at encouraging and pushing their graduate students to write and publish their work. This year was no different, with a couple more publications to add to the list:

• A paper for The International Cartographic Consortium conference around context-awareness in visualising geographical information. Presented in Paris, in July.
• Doctoral Consortium paper for Mobile HCI. Presented in Stockholm, in September.
• A book chapter in an upcoming RMIT publication around future social contexts of Geovisualisation.
• Full paper for the LBS 2011 conference. Presented in Vienna, in November.
• A visit to ARSyd to talk about how we make sense of location based data.

Apple’s WWDC

In June I attended Apple’s developer conference in San Francisco. I learnt quite a bit, but the most inspiring thing was seeing so many independent designers and developers working on things they love, and not starving during the process. I traveled with Reuben, who I highly recommend to anyone needing to share a hotel room. He doesn’t snore.

Paris

I had the opportunity to stay in Paris for the entire month of July – a week for the ICA conference, with three weeks tacked on to the end. Again, I met some great people and has some very interesting discussions about my work. I also rented a small apartment in Belleville, and worked on my french accent a little more. Weh.

Misc (or: stuff that doesn’t sound as cool).

After another year of “being a PhD student”, I feel like I’ve learnt some valuable lessons about how to be one of these wretched creatures. Particularly, I’d like to point out a few things about having a research question and involving others in your work:

1. Let the data speak for itself. Do not try to shoe-horn your research into your own pre-designed agenda. When you first start something like a PhD, you can often get excited (and overwhelmed) by the number of possible directions you might take. Of course, you then choose one of them – generally something you really like, or care about. In a beautiful twist of fate, you eventually learn that you can’t choose what you observe. Research is cyclical, and you need to pay attention to what your data is telling you at all times. Your research won’t always be what you thought it would be.
2. You need time. About half way through the year I stopped working completely, and became an actual full-time student. Granted, it was the “working”  part that eventually allowed me the freedom to do this, but clearing my plate of all other commitments was one of the best decisions of the year. You need to be fully immersed in a research thesis, and even small, one day a week commitments can be distracting. You might lose a little bit of industry experience, but you’ve got the rest of your life to get that.
3. Talk to people. Some of the best ideas and advice I’ve received have been in casual conversations with people in similar situations to me. At a pub. In a cafe. In a national park. Having a whinge every now and again is very important, but you should always take up any opportunity to speak about what you’re doing. Even if it leaves people utterly confused, hearing yourself explain something in a slightly different way will often spark new and exciting leads to follow up on. It also gets you out of your stuffy office, and highlights the value and importance of communicating your work effectively.

2012

Next year is my final year (hopefully), but I’m excited to see where it takes me. There probably will be a few less international sojourns, but I’m looking forward to producing a semi-decent thesis and beginning to explore where that might take me.

People say that after they have been in an area for a while, they start to become a reflection of that environment. Sometimes, the environment starts to reflect the [...]]]> Parks Victoria have produced a video on Aboriginal Cultural knowledge, a great introduction to the notion that people, practices and a landscape are tightly related.

People say that after they have been in an area for a while, they start to become a reflection of that environment. Sometimes, the environment starts to reflect the people. This connection between people and country is what powers the life essence and intrinsic memory imprinted in that place. It is this absorbed energy that continues to draw people there, for the same reasons, for countless generations.

Whilst the park is open to visitors, issues of access and accessibility are still persistent. These images above are taken mainly in “tourist” areas, with the signage communicating to the public. However, the issues are present for everyone: people can’t get to where they were able to [...]]]>

Whilst the park is open to visitors, issues of access and accessibility are still persistent. These images above are taken mainly in “tourist” areas, with the signage communicating to the public. However, the issues are present for everyone: people can’t get to where they were able to previously.

How is this effecting the information being collected in the park? Monitoring equipment has been disrupted, and simply can’t be gotten to. At the same time, the focus of work has shifted from ecological management to getting visitor infrastructure back up to scratch. The flood has been a hugely disruptive event that has changed how people (both public + rangers) interact with the park – and therefore, their understanding of it.

The space of a flood recovery is very different to that of normal park management. The rangers are still in that space.

Eight months after the flood at Wilson’s Promontory, Tidal River has been (kind of) re-opened to the public. People are able to stay in the park itself (fortunately, this includes researchers), but many of the surrounding trails are still in need of repair.

Status update aside: I spent two days in the park [...]]]>

Eight months after the flood at Wilson’s Promontory, Tidal River has been (kind of) re-opened to the public. People are able to stay in the park itself (fortunately, this includes researchers), but many of the surrounding trails are still in need of repair.

Status update aside: I spent two days in the park this week conducting interviews with staff. The interviews consisted of two parts: using the diary entries from a previous study as probes in interviews, to dig in to what the life of these media objects might be within the organisation; and an examination of the “personal geography” of the park, for each interviewee. This was elicited through drawings of the park – more about these in another post.

Entries as probes

I just want to give a brief summary and background on one of the methods I used in the interviews. The entry-as-probe section is a basic attempt at “following-the-thing” (Marcus, 1995) – an ethnographic method for tracking digital and media based objects across multiple sites, in order to discover their role in social processes and contexts. The key phrase here is multiple sites; despite my study area being a geographical location, its focus is on the social and organisational contexts around this location. It is not investigating what happens in the cartesian representation of the park (i.e. what you see on a traditional map), but what happens in a broader social context in order to manage that area. Without getting too sidetracked on writing about my actual thesis: it’s important to investigate the flow of information and people that make park management possible. Marcus’s method boosts the status of an “object” (in this case, a dairy entry) to an equal actor in the construction of meaning, rather than a tool to be used by people as they themselves do the construction. As such I want to investigate the potential role of these created “media” objects in the ability to trigger different interpretations for people in varying roles across the organisation.

The next step in following-the-thing is the city office. Taking entries from the park and putting them in front of people unfamiliar with it will hopefully provide some interesting insights into the different understandings they have about Wilson’s Prom.

This is all in attempt to examine the different geographies that exists within Parks Victoria. The differences between the park and the city will be a key one, I’m predicting.

Reference:

Marcus, G. (1995). JSTOR: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 24 (1995), pp. 95-117. Annual review of anthropology.