Reflections on Cultural Mapping Lounge @ Viva La Gong

On Saturday Nov 7th a team of CAMRA researchers (Chris Gibson, Andrew Warren and Ben Gallan from UOW; Lisa Andersen and Josh Edwards from UTS) staffed a stall at the Viva La Gong festival in Wollongong. We asked festival attendees to spend a few minutes of their day with us to record their views about where 'cool' and 'creative' Wollongong was in their city. We recorded what they said on MP3 recorders, and asked them to draw on maps as they described in words where 'cool' and 'creative' Wollongong was in their minds.

All up, over 160 people participated - giving us a very large dataset to analyse - a good kilo of A3 maps and nearly half a gig of MP3 recordings!

It's worth having a semi-public debrief on the method - hence this blog.

What worked - what didn't... what are the possibilities and limitations of using a festival as place to conduct a cultural mapping exercise?

I have many thoughts and I'm sure the other members of the team do too - I'll start by saying that I was surprised by the positive response, the number of participants we recruited, and the manner in which people responded. Very few people seemed uninterested; virtually noone said 'no' outright.

And most interestingly, a kind of 'learning curve' was observed among many of the participants: to begin with, people struggled to think of what places were cool or creative, but as they started the mapping process, things started to kick into place and by the end of each interview/mapping exercise, people were freely talking about Wollongong's sites and cultural activities using the map as a constant visual prompt. Scores of interviews that looked like being short 2 minute ones ended up lasting for 10, 20, even 40 minutes. I think there's a story here about how hard copy paper maps play a role in cementing a particular kind of thinking about a place. Maps are initially an interruption to people's thought processes - they catch newly recruited informants by surprise and stop people in their tracks. But eventually maps become a solid foundation for more detailed and insightful comments than might have been the case without them.

I think it worked.

I invite others on the team - and members of the public who participated on the day - to make comments about this method on this blog...

Chris