Regular visitors to the site may notice that we've added a couple of sections to the left hand navigation: Map Items and Stories. These are my first steps in visualising all of the data we have, and the connections between them, so that we can create further maps over time.
The map items are all the plug-in items we have on the float. Browsing through the lists of items you can see how each item is connected to others, through connections Kathrin mapped out prior to the start of the Triennial.
On top of all the relations between the plug-in's there are your stories. These are the connections that are inferred by the mapping we make at the float. Each story is split up into a 'portrait' and a number of stories. The portrait reflects where the visitor we've mapped have come from and how they ended up at the triennial, the stories are how they are connected to the cultural spaces in Folkestone.
It's taken a while to get these up due to a number of teething difficulties with the whole setup - it's quite a complex system and this is the first version of it. We will now be uploading new stories onto the site each day, along with photographs, and if you've already come and told us your story you can search for yourself if you know your story ID, or if you gave us a name you can search by your name (or your friend's names).
Please let us know if you see anything wrong with your mapping: there are quite a few issues with some of them from the early days, and we've not been able to attach images to mappings as reliably as we'd like to, so there may be some missing or some attached incorrectly. A quick email letting us know the Story ID ( eg m48625ab2 ) and what's wrong and we'll get on with updating it.
This might not look like a map, in the traditional sense, at the moment, but if you start browsing through the links you'll start to see how places are interconnected by people's stories, how certain places are more fundamental to stories than others. These connections are a map, albeit represented like a text based adventure game on an 80's computer. My ability to see the map in my head probably comes from too many hours spent playing them as a kid.
My task now is to start to gather all of the data we have hear into some form of visualisation. The first step of this is for me to start visualising each of the stories we've been given. Once I can see the spread of those I'll be able to see how we can clearly map the relationships between the stories.
So, please keep checking back to see new bit's appear, and if you want to be kept updated of changes subscribe to out mailing list or our blog's RSS feed.
