Here are step-by-step manuals documenting the workshops that have been organized as part of the Welcome to My Place activities. They are all free and under a Creative Commons License. Please check more details about the licenses inside each document.

These manuals can be used as:

1. Tools to better understand the identity of a place or an area (in the context of an ethnographic study for example).
2. Introductions to a collective urban planning effort (e.g. design charrette) or in combination with a community mapping exercise (see for example http://www.mappingforchange.org.uk).
3. Introductions to video making and subjective maps.

Welcome to My Place – video workshop manual: This manual is based on the workshops organised in February 2010 for the Transition Finsbury Park association, and on individual contributions to the Welcome to My Place project. Participants are invited to choose places that are important to them, optionally within a defined perimeter, and to welcome viewers in videos no more than one minute long. Read here a review of how it went for us.

Welcome to My Place – subjective maps workshop manual: This manual is based on the March 2010 workshop organised for the Transition Finsbury Park association. Participants are invited to draw subjective maps of their neighbourhood and to discuss the area. Read here a review of how it went.

]]> http://curatedmatter.org/2010/05/09/welcome-to-my-place-workshop-manuals/feed/ 0 http://curatedmatter.org/2010/05/09/welcome-to-my-place-subjective-maps/ http://curatedmatter.org/2010/05/09/welcome-to-my-place-subjective-maps/#comments Sun, 09 May 2010 03:02:43 +0000 bruchansky http://curatedmatter.org/?p=708

This page is basically another way to introduce the activities organised as part of the Welcome to My Place project. They all involved at some point subjective maps. Subjective maps don’t have to be spatially accurate; they should communicate how a territory is perceived. They are a tool of critical cartography, “a set of mapping practices and theoretical critique grounded in critical theory. It differs from classical cartography in that it links geographic knowledge with power, and thus is political. Critical cartographers do not aim to invalidate maps; instead the critique is a careful analysis identifying maps attributes that are taken for granted” (Wikipedia).

Every map is partly subjective in fact, and as the towards project in Brussels explains it, the aim “is in no way to give up a so-called objective cartography to head for a subjective cartography, but to think about representations that would come to terms with this subjectivity in the approach of the territory and to promote the plurality of cartographic visions”.

Here are few links for people interested in cartography:

• Strange Maps, a great blog about strange maps.
• Open Street Map, the alternative to Google Maps. The community based approach avoids the problems related to dodgy legal ownership of the data, as exemplified during the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
• Towards, a subjective collective cartography of Brussels.
• Intrusive Connections, a project I did a while ago questioning the utilitarian use of maps.
• The Mapping for Change project that provides “participatory mapping services to communities, voluntary sector organisations, local authorities and developers”.
• Vague fuzzy vernacular geographies, or why to use sprays in maps.
• A summary of the sessions held during the Where Camp EU non-conference that I attended in March 2010.

The following paper on the appropriation of space is not specifically about maps but describes the spaces they mediate and the places they locate.

And here are some of the subjective maps drawn at the occasion of the Welcome to My Place project:

• A subjective map of the London N4 area made during the Welcome to Finsbury Park workshop, organised in collaboration with the Transition Finsbury Park association. You can find here a step-by-step manual.

• Another subjective map of the London N4 area, made by children this time.

• A map of the main ‘teletransporters’ near the Olympic Station in Hong Kong. Find out what it is about in my study on verticality.

• More to come…

As part of the Children’s Art Day 2009 and the Dreams of Progress exhibition, a storyboarding workshop was organised for the pupils of the year 4 from St Clement Danes School. Children learned how to create storyboards from pre-existing video material. Besides the fun and practical experience gained from the workshop, kids also learned how the same video footages can be sequenced to create many different stories;  how what is showed everyday on TV is not an exact representation of reality but the result of a montage.

Children used the footages from the  utopian video ‘Design for Dreaming’ (General Motors  – 1956) to create their storyboards. The workshop was inspired by the ‘Same video, different use’ collaborative project initiated by the video artist Remyyy; where artists can each post online their remixes of the same archive video. The best storyboard from the workshop has been transformed in a movie and posted online next to the contribution from video artists.

Winning storyboard of the year 4 from St Clement Danes School.

During the workshop, children were first presented with the original video. I showed them thereafter an example of storyboard (two of them were created before the workshop:  ‘Once upon a time’ and ‘I had a freaky nightmare’). The kids were split in 4 groups, each having in front of them a little less than a hundred printed images representing scenes from the movie. They randomly picked up a sentence to start their story with, e.g. “1..2..3..Action!”,  “This is the future”, “Dance to my beat”, “It was a freaky nightmare”. The groups had 40 minutes to create their storyboard, made of scenes from the original movie and of texts that they could add in between. In the last 10 minutes of the session, the groups presented their storyboard to the rest of the class, so that pupils could vote for their favourite story.

The winners when they presented their storyboard to the rest of class.

Everyone listening at the story of the second group.

The third group busy making their own story.

The fourth group starting their storyboard with the teachers.

The storyboard of the fourth group.

The children didn’t have any problems understanding the concept of sequencing movie scenes. The main challenge they experienced was to not replicate the original film but to invent a new story; which they succeeded after a short time necessary to distance themselves from what they’ve just seen.

The storyboarding workshop would not have run so smoothly without the commitment of Rossella Black from the WRF, all the volunteers helping out preparing the session and the facilitation of the teachers from St Clement Danes School.