something I said

Thanks to Jon Bounds and Travel West Midlands, I have a one day bus pass that will probably be used for the longest journey I can manage, complete with photos.

I did this last year, when my last three 2007 Daysaver cards were about to expire. I used one of them to visit points between Moseley and Halesowen, alternating between bus and foot, taking photos all the while.

Halesowen was one of three places I’d considered visiting by bus. The other two were Wolverhampton and Water Orton, but didn’t get to. I am probably going to use my new Daysaver for the Wolverhampton excursion, to take in some of the canals and countryside around Oxley and Moseley. I will document it, of course, using camera and possibly GPS.

I have some variations on this idea, one of which involves a group effort - people with Daysavers spending a day doing the same, and creating photojourneys, perhaps with the assistance of TWM or regional cultural/development agencies. Another involves producing artefacts like maps - perhaps a combination of GPS tracks, photos, and objects found en route. The latter suits my solo purposes, but is not something I’ll have the resources to pull off for some time. Perhaps by the 2010 expiration date!

The question of GPS is iffy, because the only unit I have access to is a Garmin eTrex. The reception is basic, and the sampling rate is very low, so most of my tracks are intermittent - particularly when it involves being inside a vehicle.

The Halesowen excursion track is shown below, and the orange segments are a good illustration of the GPS losing satellite connections over various distances. Some of these were on foot, others on the bus. A better unit would have more frequent connections and produce a better track.

Producing a map track like this is no longer special, and with the advent of Google Streetview, tracking a series of local scenes will also become commonplace. But mixing up one’s own images and producing one’s own cartography has the potential to be a richer, more engaging process and result.

The GPS is useful in this regard because some GPS units, like the Garmin Gecko, make it somewhat easier to synchronise one’s photos to the track. (I tried this along the Holder’s Lane footpath at the Open Streetmap party in April, but never got the hang of the software.) What I’d like to do is use the track as a proportional datum for organising a physical display. For example, a piece of string scaled with relative intervals, elevations and orientations becomes an organising device for photos and other sorts of objects. Alternatively, some sort of folding paper - be it a booklet or an origami polyhedron - would make a tactile representation of one’s excursion. A roomful of these would make an interesting, fun exhibit.