I’ve written up a short investigation on Juicy Geography’s Google Earth blog
Tag Archive for 'fieldwork'
I have written an article about teaching with GPS, which can be found at Juicy Geography. The page includes links to some Google Maps I prepared that show how GPS Visualizer can be used to plot fieldwork data.
GPS Visualizer seems to grow new features each week and is a brilliant application for displaying yourGPS data.. The other essential utility featured is Easy GPS. I hadn’t realized until recently that it now manages GPS tracks as well as routes and waypoints. Both these programs are free.
I have added the first of my Yellow Arrows to two locations in North Devon that are important to me. The others will be used in a Geography/Art collaboration
project.
This is the very first arrow:
There are lots of surf shops in North Devon, the arrow is placed on the window of the only shop manufacturing surfboards locally. If you’re in Braunton, text the code on the arrow to the SMS number provided, for a personal message!
This arrow has been placed somewhere on a beach. I’m not saying which beach, or where the arrow is located, but it’s not hard to find!
There’s a message for weekend / London surfers to be discovered.
Tomorrow I will be moblogging directly from a GCSE fieldtrip on Exmoor, (providing there’s an Orange signal!) I will also be testing some handheld GPS units and Phone2GEarth as well. The idea is to use the the phone to locate and photograph the fieldwork sites. The phone images will be geotagged in the evening.
The handheld GPS units will be used in conjunction with a traditional gun clinometer to measure the gradient of the river bed and the valley sides. The results will be available on this site in .gpx format so that they can be viewed in GPS Visualizer. It will be interesting to evaluate the accuracy of the traditional method compared to the modern.
I’ve tried out a little mobile phone application called “Phone 2 Google Earth” The program communicates with a bluetooth GPS and records your position at regular intervals for as long as required. You can also record placemarks. The data is saved as a KML file, which can be transferred from the phone to a PC. Here is an example google earth file .
click to enlargeThe llamas featured as a placemark can be seen on my moblog.
The colour and opacity of the track can be modified once it has been imported to Google Earth via the advanced tab. It would be nice if there was an option to output the data as a GPX file which would preserve other aspects of the GPS log, such as speed and altitude, giving you the choice as to whether to use Google Earth or GPS Visualizer to view the data. As a basic tracking program however, Phone2GEarth works very well, and I’ll use it for fieldwork.
I’m having a break from this blog for a few days while I investigate the potential of moblogging for geography fieldwork.
I have set up a sandbox moblog here, and I’m using a Blogger site to post about my progress. When you think about it, the ability to travel somewhere, take a picture and write a few words, then in seconds, publish on the internet is pretty amazing. Well it is to me anyway!
Since moving away from London, I’d forgottten about the Yellow Arrow project. Although the concept was born in 2004, it is still very much part of the zeitgeist, and a recent investigation into Semipedia see post, together with my impending smart phone purchase (this week!) prompted a quick post.
Yellow Arrow describes itself as a “Massively Authored Artistic Production” or MAAP, according to the website. It’s a spatial anotation project, the aim being to tag features of interest with a yellow arrow sticker bearing a unique code. When someone finds the arrow, they text the code and receive back a message, about that location. In some cities, the yellow arrows form an unconventional tour through parts of the landscape that would be hidden from non-locals - creating a geographical adventure by text.
photo by Stillben
Potentially, Yellow Arrow would make a unique local study. Where would students place the arrows? What would the messages be?
A subversive, graffitti-based local place study, linking the virtual and human environment? It really sounds like my next fieldwork project! No seriously…
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