Building the Northern Adelaide Research Archive

Canberra.
The final speaker in this session at ANZCA 2010 is Kerry Green, who presents on the Northern Adelaide Research Archive, an archive which aims to connect a range of previously isolated information on Northern Adelaide. Northern Adelaide has tended to be represented as backward and crime-ridden in the media, and this has been a cause of some concern; prominent people from the area, including singer Jimmy Barnes, have spoken out against this and pushed for a change in media attitudes.

In part, this was facilitated through the organisation of the Northern Summit, developing a number of ideas for change - for example, mapping and coordinating the positive activities happening in the area; developing life transition programmes based on these maps, linked with TAFEs and universities; and improving publicity and access to information for those who can benefit from it. Web 2.0 technology is seen as an important element in this.

The inspiration for such mapping work is the famous discovery of the water-borne transmission processes of cholera by John Snow in 1854, by mapping cases of cholera and tracking them to a single pump in London. Indeed, today services like Google Maps are being used by a great range of users to plot official and user-generated data onto a geographical map.

One activity of the project was to display the incidence of media stories about Northern Adelaide locations on a geographical map - showing a strongly negative bias and pointing to the key areas which were most frequently negatively portrayed. The next step is to contrast this with popular perceptions of the area - around themes such as creativity, desirability, progress, technology, opportunity, science, and the quality of life, for example. What will be interesting to see is also whether and what additional information may be gathered in the process - and whether there are any privacy and/or ethics concerns here. One way of addressing such concerns may also be also to involve the people of Northern Adelaide themselves as co-investigators.

Technorati : ANZCA 2010, Northern Adelaide, geography, mapping, media representations, visualisation
Del.icio.us : ANZCA 2010, Northern Adelaide, geography, mapping, media representations, visualisation