Mapping the city

I’ve been interested in ideas about digital mapping and tagging. In the past I’ve thought about this in terms of apps, and gave a paper last year at the RGS about the Museum of London’s app ‘StreetMuseum‘ and how it connects objects and places and technology in different ways.

I’ve been thinking again about apps and maps, and this time about non-specialist maps. I thought about them this week when faced with a road googlemaps assured me I could walk down, and common sense confirmed I could not. I thought about them when I read this interesting article about mapping. I thought about the maps of Eric Fischer, which Rainey Tisdale reminded me of in a talk. And I thought about them again when I checked my Facebook privacy settings.

Although games like Foursquare and Gowalla presented mapping as a primary part of app use, it seems that mapping and tagging is more often carried out as secondary functions to other social media. Relying on your default settings you can send out a geotagged tweet, you can be ‘tagged’ somewhere on facebook and have your instagram photos mapped without making a particular decision to do so. I’m interested in how this distracted mapping occurs and where and when it doesn’t occur.

The driving-default of Californian Google maps is not an especially intuitive way to transcribe the experience of moving around London. Google maps data is road-based an often road-bound, providing something different to the level of detail of an Ordnance Survey map. Although Google may move into museums its road and satellite-based system only suits certain gallery styles and models of visitor flow. Fischer’s maps, made up of flikr location data and Open Street Map mirror these road structures because they rely on data from the road-based flikr map. Fischer’s maps reiterate an impersonal impression: I take few of my photographs on roads. Many more are taken in parks, on beaches, on footpaths, in pubs, in clubs and of course in houses and gardens.

The maps that these apps use, create and embellish, present hollow cities, not especially representative of the places in which we live. The technical constrains of road maps are often matched with an intentional process; we don’t all wish to map our locations, workspaces or our homes, so we are complicit in creating gappy cartographies.

Anxieties about mapping are often expressed in terms of criminality: commentators warned that Instagram and Facebook‘s maps might give information to burglers or stalkers. I’m less interested in the veracity of these claims and more interested in the discomfort they express. There are other objections too — when my dad first suggested I use Frifi I sent him a slightly peeved reply highlighting part of the promo text:

“Amazing software for finding the exact location of your friends – great for the beach, hiking, concerts, nights out, keeping tabs on the kids…”

The ways in which we use maps has changed, and it seems like maps are presented as harvesting data as often as they are providing it. “Any square mile of the planet can be described in an infinite number of ways”, argues Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian article and tagging gives form to a range of responses. I’m curious about how people manage these mapping processes, especially when they are a secondary function to doing something else. I’ve seen people disabling the functions or engaging with them playfully by renaming certain locations, and I’m especially interested in these kinds of mapping which are accidental, unconscious, resented or outright refused.

 

 

 

As ever I wrote this blog post to give form to my ideas, and I have shared it in the hope it is read in the discursive, speculative spirit intended. It touches on thoughts and writing I have come across serendipitously, rather than being built on careful research. I would be very grateful if anyone would like to share their ideas, thoughts, criticisms or links to articles, experiments and other research here.

Thank you for reading.

Ten things I learned this week about writing my PhD

Here are ten things I’ve learnt about myself and how I write. I’ve probably learnt them over a few years, but this week I’ve put them into words.

• I cannot work whilst listening to music.
• I cannot concentrate very well if I have not had breakfast.
• Writing will always take longer than I expect.
• Sometimes you should just admit that you need a stapler.
• Formatting my documents with wide margins and writing in size 10 Times, with 1.5 line spacing seems to help me focus on writing better, rather than more. I guess I’m pretty superficial.
• When I am confused by the structure of my writing it’s helpful to start a new document and copy any bits of writing I particularly like, rather than try to force it.
• Sometimes I’m shy of writing emails. Drafting them at half past five one day, then reading through and send them the next morning seems to take the edge off of it.
• The pomodoro technique of 25 minutes concentration at a time helps me to focus.
• Don’t do the same thing every 5 minute break. Twitter is nice but sometimes it’s better to move around. Similarly do not get yourself a cup of tea or glass of water every time. It just won’t work.
• Happily there doesn’t seem to be a productivity lapse if I write whilst wearing my pyjamas.

Feel free to add more in the comments, I’m really nosy and love this sort of thing

curator/curated/curating

It’s been interesting to see the broadening popularity of the words ‘curator’, ‘curated’ and ‘curating’ growing over the last few years. It’s especially interesting to me as I have the impression that it comes at a time when many museum curators feel their professional recognition is declining.

I have a cynical impression that the term ‘curator’ is sometimes used as a very shallow credibility grab. I often feel use of the word has very little to do with the work museum curators do, preferring to allude to an idealised notion informed by (problematic) ideas about authority and museums of the past. Sometimes ‘curating’ is just seems to be a fancy way of saying ‘making decisions about’, as in this Huffington Post piece about ‘curating your own life.’

Curators Conference (which I found through Susie Bubble’s blog) looks like it will provide some thoughtful insight into the adoption of the term beyond the museum:

We’ll all be speaking about the idea of curation and how it has infiltrated our respective creative fields.  Why exactly have we hijacked that word and why has it become the buzzword to use in new media and commerce start-ups and in brands’ marketing strategies?

(Susie Bubble)

It would be good to learn more about why people who direct music videos and photograph fashion adopt the terms. Hopefully they’ll be able to change my cynical view, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for anything emerging from the day.

It’s important to stress that discussions about the definition of curator aren’t just taking place beyond the museum. As part of the Citizen Curators project, Peter Ride has written an interesting blog post about the project’s decision to use the word ‘curators.’ I’ve also been following some interesting discussions about ‘curator’ and language on twitter. I thought Rebeckah Higgitt and Rachel Souhami made interesting points about the kinds of skills and combination of authorities that shape exhibitions. Danny Birchill, in the same twitter conversation, contributed a link to this interesting article about International Art English which explores some of the newer uses of the word ‘curate.’

Of course I should also be a little self-critical here: ‘curating’ is right there in my thesis title, and hasn’t got an especially strong claim on being an actual, legitimate word. Furthermore, I often use ‘curating’ to mean one, specific aspect of museum work, and could substitute ‘exhibition-making’ in many of my uses. Perhaps I should spend a little longer considering why and how I use those words myself.

eyetracking

No matter how beautiful, colourful, bright or striking an object picture is, it can’t catch my eye as quickly as the grey words ‘sorry no image available’. Even though I worked on 1,788 digitised valentines cards, there are 30 which do not have photographs. It’s always those my eye is drawn to.

I tried out tracking studies as an intern at the British Museum, and now I’m curious about the eyetracking of websites. On the Museum of London’s Collections Online site you can present search results as an illustrated list of objects, or a grid of thumbnails. These two functions can be broadly compared to text and image searches, which research shows users look at in different ways. 

The list view is helpful for a general search on collections online, when a term like ‘Covent Garden’ brings up a broad, and often surprising, range of objects. It looks as though the ‘F’ shape that text-searches are often read in suits the list view of the collections online page, where the image is presented on the left of the page.

Sometimes I go through the curated groups, which give an introduction to the objects I will see. With these contextualised groups, like the Valentine cards, I prefer changing the setting to show 60 thumbnails. When this happens, ‘sorry no image available’ always catches my eye.

It might be a long-established personal propensity for pessimism: I have a childhood memory of a digital interactive saying “please wait; sound is loading.” It might be the Tetris negative motivation I wrote about before: your eyes identifying your own mistakes. I haven’t run into any studies into the ‘no image available’ as visual attractor, I would be very interested to read some if you have any recommendations.

Exhibiting the Pleasure Gardens

At the weekend I visited ‘The Triumph of Pleasure’ exhibition at the Foundling Museum. I’ve never been to the Foundling Museum before, and will admit to having made a rather haphazard visit around it. The temporary exhibition at the moment is about the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, and has been curated by David Coke. Coke’s fascination with the gardens has resulted in years of research and the Vauxhall gardens website. The museum’s entry fee included a guide, with an essay that compliments Coke’s style and is neatly illustrated with items from the exhibition.

I’ve been working on an article about exhibiting the Pleasure Gardens, and I was especially excited to see two of the exhibits. The first was Lucy Askew’s model of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, which is available to look at on the V&A’s website. The avenue layout of the gardens meant I could put my eye to the case and kid myself I was there for a second. The peculiar magic of museum models has been discussed elsewhere, and if you’re half as sweet on them as I am then download this talk by Alex Werner, at the Anglo-American conference 2009.

My second favourite item was a copy of the gardens’ menu, detailing the portions and prices that Coke’s essay explores in more depth. The gardens were known for their steep prices, and Miles Ogborn has used the ostentatious dining at the gardens as an example of London’s growing modernity. Once I would have been surprised at how much information was stored on one piece of printed ephemera, but I think I’m starting to get used to it.

Perhaps the gardens are having a new moment: my sister recently went to an event at the new London Pleasure Gardens. She couldn’t quite understand why I was so interested in what the floor was like, what the music was like, what food was being served, what the layout of the site was and what everyone was wearing. It seems there were more complaints than just the price of the food.

In my forthcoming paper I look at how the phenomenon of London’s Pleasure Gardens were recreated at the Museum of London. I will write about how exhibitions are not inevitable, and the range of displays that museums choose between. The two pleasure gardens displays are a good example. Coke’s exhibition at the Foundling is tightly focussed and informative. The Museum of London uses film, lighting, sound effects and costume to evoke the sense of visiting the gardens: it probably has more in common with Askew’s model than Coke’s exhibition.

Remaking the Pleasure Gardens at the Museum of London. Photo by author.

For proper review of the exhibition then there are some nice an in depth ones here and here.

EDIT: As of Friday 3rd of August 2012, the London Pleasure Gardens have gone into administration. More here.

exploring/visiting

I once went to a house the National Trust had only just acquired and hadn’t yet opened.  Walking through the rooms was one of the creepiest feelings of my life.  My imagination couldn’t shake a sense of trespass; an instrusion I was not easy at making.  Walking through that building was sad, but not because of what it said of the distant past.  The last of the family had only recently moved out but their patina remained on the house.  Above the toilet in one of the bathrooms, a snapshot of a dog was sellotaped to the ceiling.  Flourescent ‘Fat Willy’s surf shack’ stickers had been half-scraped from the back of a door.  A few of the rooms were equipped with the handles and bannisters I recognise from my elderly relatives’ homes.  Years later I visited Merchant’s House Museum in New York and I read a caption that brought the National Trust house to mind. It said the MHM’s last inhabitants had ‘outlived the family fortune’.

Although I pride myself in my continued support of a good scone, I wonder if this kind of vivid visit can happen at houses that serve cream teas or charge an admission fee. Sites like the Dennis Severs house try to invoke this feeling, but it’s not really there the same way.  The feeling of exploring rather than visiting seemed more like (a very tame version of) Brad’s research into urban exploration.  I went to Sutton House a couple of months ago, and really enjoyed their representation of the different people who had used the house, up to and including the squatters who had lived there in the 1980s.  The feeling of intrusion was absent this time, but it was much livelier with traces of so many inhabitants.

My feelings at that newly-acquired house were imagined.  My reactions were speculative, and were really nothing more than autobiographical.  There was little left in the building, and without knowing much about the place or its history, I instinctively inferred a narrative onto the place.  It was bewitching.  When the NT have finished interpreting the house and opened it up to visitors I’ll go back, and learn as well as react.  I’ll probably buy a cream tea.  I wonder what I’ll make of my second visit.

- This post started out last year as a response to Stewart Lee’s article in the Observer, then resurfaced in a reply to Maria’s blog, Preservation and Place.  Then I decided I might as well finish writing it up and here we are.

Tetris

‘What appears in your eyes all the time are your mistakes’

- Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris inventor, speaking in Tetris: From Russia with Love

Oonagh Murphy recently wrote about gamifying the PhD, describing a system of rewards and positive reinforcements. Conference papers, productive meetings with supervisors, publications and collaborative projects definitely feel rewarding but the daily work of a PhD feels more like a game of Tetris. ‘Tetris is a game with a very strong negative motivation’, argues Mikhail Kulagin, in the same film. The good chapters and finished articles are like the completed lines; they’re set aside from your workspace and converted into points on the scoreboard, ticked off your thesis plan or added to your CV. Your research gaps, incomplete bibliographies and works in progress are the things you see on the screen in front of you.

Sometimes writing up a PhD feels a lot like Tetris. As the documentary’s voiceover explains: ‘all that remains is what you’ve failed to complete’. What the voiceover doesn’t convey is the intense, immersive feeling of yearning towards the next complete moment. The Tetris Effect ’occurs when people devote sufficient time and attention to an activity that it begins to overshadow their thoughts, mental images, and dreams.’ I think every PhD student can relate to that.

You don’t ever complete a game of Tetris and I don’t suppose you really ever complete your thesis: both just reach a point where they come to an end.