Tomorrow morning I’m off to ISEA to talk in a panel called ‘Ludic Maps‘. It’s the first time I’ve talked about my research that is not videogame related so it should be a new and exciting experience. My paper ‘Datalogging the Landscape’ explores some of my adventures with GPS devices both on my iPhone (using an application called ‘trails’) and a stand alone device (the GlobalSat 100), as a way of tracking some of my journeys and geotagging any photographs I take along the way. It’s been a side project to my other work that primarily seeks to understand videogame spaces, and it’s opened my eyes up to different ways of seeing and experiencing places through digital and analogue mediums. I also really love maps and traveling so that’s an added bonus.

I might post up some more of the talk here after the event, but I thought I would use this post to show some of the tracks I created over the summer. In July I did a roadtrip from the UK to Sweden. As it was only planned a few weeks before we went, there weren’t any boats from the UK to Denmark which would have made for a shorter journey, so the track starts in Calais after taking the Eurotunnel from Folkestone. I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t start the journey in the UK. I think part of the reason is that I still have ‘location-paranoia’, in so much as although I love the idea of geo-locating things, I’m still not happy about that being within my immediate home life area. The route from my home to Folkestone and across the tunnel is also one I have made on numerous occasions and know well, therefore I think in the back of my mind I always had the idea that I could add that detail in at a later date if I decided to.

So here’s the route we took in mapped form. As a written descitption, the main stop-over points were: Brugge (Belgium), Dötlingen (Germany), Nyborg (Denmark), Ystad (Sweden), Karlskrona (Sweden), Lund (Sweden), Göteborg (Sweden), Aalborg (Denmark), Neumünster (Germany), Mulheim an der Ruhr (Germany), St Omer (France).

As well as tracking the entire journey, I also tracked side trips taken at certain point. On a day out near Karlskrona we had read about some rock paintings. Their location was shown on tourist maps as a rough estimate as to the area they could be found in, but there were no road signs to them as there were to other sites. We eventually took a risk down a side track and ended up in a small parking area that showed the walk to the stones. Using the GPS devices I managed to capture the path I walked to the stones, and I now have it saved as a location within my own personal database of journeys.

That’s something I’ve learnt from this project, I really love creating my own maps and then seeing the end result after the experience has ended. The GlobalSat 100 is a small black box with 3 lights. One shows the GPS is supposedly working, the other one shows the internal battery charge and the last one tells you if the memory is full or not. There is no display and no way of knowing if the device is actually capturing any GPS data until you download it onto the computer.

On our way back from Sweden we took the boat from Goteborg to Fredrikshavn in Denmark. Half way between the two places the boat stopped as a fishing net became caught in one of the propellers. The boat felt as though it was drifting and when we finally got going again, the wake showed a curved path as we started to get back on course. Later when I downloaded the track it shows a small loop at the moment that we stopped as shown here (with some images of people on the boat wondering what is going on, and a lovely view of the sea)

It’s experiences such as these that I will be talking about next Saturday. My personal journeys now digitally captured through tracks and imagery, viewed against a backdrop of other mapped information, a growing database of information about the places and spaces we are living in.