On data and discovery

I had a decently productive week. I conducted field work twice and I'm going to post some anecdotal accounts of those excursions as soon as I can, lots of strange happenings.

While out in the field I had the gigapan panoramic photobot. It's basically a little tripod mounted guy with two motors and a robot finger for snapping photos over a grid. It's pretty neato. I was able to take four panoramas on Tuesday (Jan. 13) and one on Thursday (Jan. 15). Tuesday's panoramas are stitched and uploaded. Check out the dead strip mall, Belvedere Plaza, Midtown Promenade 1 and Midtown Promenade 2.

Being out in the field got me thinking about the elusive quality of this project's data. The experiential stuff, which I'll post later, involves men of god, Crunk Clubs, and shopping for guava jelly. That's all well and good, but I've got a masters project that needs doing!

What I've mostly been getting are interesting observations when I sit down with the photos and start tracing aerial maps of strip malls. I do the latter exercise to break the strip malls down into abstract blocks and lines. I spoke of Lynch's elements as a lens for exploration in the previous post and it's been interesting to see what aspects of strip malls take on the elements seamlessly and what aspects require some shoehorning.

What I'm finding, from my design work and experiential accounts, is that elemental qualities of strip malls are variable. To clarify, strip malls take on different images from different perspectives.

The pedestrian experience is markedly different than the motorist experience. Yet the motorist inevitably becomes a pedestrian at some point. The motorist/pedestrian dichotomy is one tension worth exploring. For the motorist parking lanes can quickly change from paths to edges depending on the number of parked cars present. This really isn't an issue for someone on foot.

The image of the strip mall is variable among pedestrians. The view from the parking lot is different than that of walking store fronts. There's a sort of macro view/micro view binary.

Nodes, or areas of concentrated qualities or foci which people enter, are present in the form of larger, more popular stores, theaters or restaurants. These can become landmarks for a motorist outside of the strip mall. Alternatively, when they aren't busy, they may simply just be landmarks.

I just needed to get these observations out of my head. I feel that anyone of these is ripe for digital media intervention. Digital media enables transitional views, accommodates multiple perspectives, and can portray phenomena over time. That's a small rebut to the menacing question that closed the last entry.

Theoretical Lens

With millions of vague ideas coursing through my mind and panic taking hold of me, I met with my advisor, Carl DiSalvo, to discuss ways of actually getting my work done. He suggested, firstly, that I not wig out and, secondly, that I make some definitive decisions. One decision in particular: choose a theoretical model. He suggested either Lynch's Elements of the City or Susan Leigh Star's Ethnography of Infrastructure, and, once decided upon, abstracting it, and applying it to my field work.

It's interesting how themes reemerge within the Digital Media program. A lot of the work I've done in this program returns to one text in particular: Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City. So it's no surprise, when overstimulated, over-read, and wigging out, I found some comfort in returning to Lynch.

Elements of the city image, according to Lynch, are Paths, Edges, Districts, Nodes and Landmarks. Here's an extremely brief delineation of the elements. Lynch also talks about form qualities of the elements, like singularity, dominance, visual scope and continuity, to name a few, and how they inform a Sense of the Whole and the Metropolitan Form.

When I go out to strip malls, when I analyze my experiential notes and look at my pictures, I'm ultimately looking for: elements of the city image within the strip mall; form qualities of these elements; and what, if possible, might be the sense of the whole.

While my panic is temporarily at bay, there is a menacing question that looms: what does this have to do with digital media? While I may be using software to trace and abstract maps of strip malls, I'm still not showing the benefits of doing so nor am I developing a system that employs digital media to effectively convey the image of the city through the lens of a strip mall. And therein lies the real challenge, and relevance, of masters work in Digital Media.