biomapping edmonton?

What fascinates me about Biomapping is how it sort of of disproves one of its own assumptions. It's a space-based concept, mapping emotional response to geographical location, and there were responses to specific, concrete locations ("Beautiful mural by Andrew Schoultz," "Really big hill") -- but there were also random experiences that could have happened anywhere in any city (my personal favourite: "I got startled by pigeons," followed quickly by "Tried to stomp on pigeons"). It might be worthwhile to do a statistical analysis and trace out ratios and patterns, but anyway the data indicates -- maybe -- that what seems like it'd be incidental to our experience of place is actually central to it.

Also interesting: responses to place that relied on memory ("Walked by ex-girlfriend's house"), foregrounding the way the project maps how people are embedded in places. As I discussed with my group at the end of Thursday's class, the map of Edmonton I would love to see is one in which five different people are "released" into the wild of Edmonton at the same spot, then allowed to disperse within a given area. Their autonomous journeys and emotional responses would be recorded and displayed -- each in a different colour, maybe? -- on the same map. While the biomaps we saw gave a sense of a synchronic moment, collapsing time into a bunch of data points, this could fold those scattered, striking moments into diachronic narrative strands, revealing the way individuals appropriate the same space in different ways.

It might also be a revealing experience for the participants. De Certeau says that walkers of a city write urban texts blindly, without being able to read them. A lot of the responses on Nold's biomaps indicated that wearing his scientific mood ring heightened their awareness-- of their mission, but also in general; they were, perhaps, not as blind as the average urban pedestrian.