Social Mapping

Day one of the BCT (orientation and administration aside) so the 'social' aspect of today's project seemed apt. It was all very secret yesterday with all to be unveiled only today, leaving one to contemplate over night exactly what social mapping would be. Well, the gears of my imagination were in overdrive anyway.

My first thought was the ever popular social networking sights where anyone can network with people they know or once knew, friends of friends or even friends of friends of friends, as means of sharing photos, stories,
blogs and the like.

And it fact, it turned out to be a similar sort of concept. So we all start as post-it notes and from there we are the center of our own network or constellation if you will, scattered across the wide expanse of wall that we are to map. From ourselves, we branch out into our interests, our likes and dislikes and walks of life which define who we are.

Like so.

It is at this point we stop to think about what we have done thus far. It seemed logical now to link up our common interests which in reality draw us together to complete the network or map. I thought about the purpose of a map and in that it is to understand a greater area than that immediately around us and how it relates to where we are as well as all the places we can go and all the paths we can take. Hence, a similar result achieved through social mapping. On a larger scale besides our favourite TV shows or least desired vegetables, it is our common circumstances and interests which brought us all to the BCT and which will allow us to learn off each other from our diversities to extend our networks and our maps further.

It was on this note, I remember a quote I heard once which seemed to fit this train of thought: "If I give you an apple and you give me an apple, we each have one apple. If I give you an idea and you give me and idea, we each have two ideas."

So with a new colour of yarn we began to visually represent these interests and connect our constellations to reach a final result which was perhaps a little visually confusing and chaotic.

After exercising our creative sides, it was time to adapt it over onto the technological side to visually represent the same information generated through computer software. The purpose of the same sort of visual representation known as network analysis was to collect and clarify a set of date. This again comes back to the idea of a map where geographical locations have been logically collected and compiled to clarify information about a location. What we have achieved is the compilation of data about each individual to visually represent ourselves and how we relate to each other for the purpose of being able to understand and then extend our network and ourselves.

The hardest part of the activity was getting the finished diagram printed.