Artist Christian Nold has made some fascinating maps using a technique he calls bio mapping, in which participants walk through a city while wearing a device that simultaneously records Galvanic Skin Response (a measure of emotional arousal) and geographic location. Nold combines this data with annotations from the participants to map the emotional geography of a city. Check out, for instance, the Stockport Emotion Map, the East Paris Emotion Map, or the Brentford Biopsy.
Equally interesting is the Newham Sensory Deprivation Map. In this project, participants were divided into teams of two: one person received a GPS along with pencil and paper, while the other had his or her sight and hearing disabled by a blindfold and noise-cancelling headphones. The participants were then asked to walk around Newham Sixth Form College in London, recording the perceptions of the sensory-impaired person. The result is "an alternative sensory map" of the area.
Nold has also edited a book entitled Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self, available as a free PDF download on his site.
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| The Stockport Emotion Map. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.5 License. |
2 comments:
This is interesting. I wonder how they control for physical responses to the terrain, though. If you have to exert yourself climbing stairs, going up hills, etc, that would certainly affect your sweating and autonomic arousal.
Excellent question. I'm not sure how he accounts for physical stimuli. Off the top of my head, I suppose you could overlay a set of elevation data and remove the GSR measurements from the areas with high slopes, substituting the annotations for the GSR data.
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