Capturing the Journey on Foot and Bike: Youth Collecting Mobility Data in and Around Their Community

• In Event: Gearing Up: New Technologies for Participant-Collected Data

Abstract

According to the National Research Council Report, Learning to Think Spatially (2006), one aspect of thinking spatially is competency with reading, interpreting, and making representations. The ubiquity of geo-spatial technologies in daily life – GPS-enabled smart phones, navigation systems, and open source online GIS – has not only intensified occasions for spatial thinking “on the move,” but has equipped the everyday user with tools to update “official” representations of lived spaces (Kingston, 2007). This paper describes youth, participating in a bicycle-building and riding workshop, using GPS and GIS technology to record, analyze, and build representations of their own newly-enhanced mobility. Our study explored innovative ways of leveraging geo-spatial technologies to facilitate participants’ critical awareness of places and pathways throughout their neighborhood that were important for daily life but were not accurately represented in official maps.
Six local teenage volunteers captured their own mobility data, using GPS loggers, head-mounted cameras, digital cameras, and time-diaries as an addition to their participation in the typical bicycle workshop activities. Before youth finished building their bicycles, they engaged in instructional activities that capitalized on experiences in their community at a walking-scale, such as ground-truthing maps and geocaching. They also captured the places and pathways that were important for home life over two five-day periods. Once the bicycles were completed, many of the same activities were iterated at a biking-scale. After five weeks of activities “on the move,” participants had a cache of items including, but not limited to: geo-tagged photographs highlighting aspects of the neighborhood important to them, GPS drawings made through the city streets, track data from life before and after acquiring a bicycle, and time-diary entries recounting activities and company kept throughout the day. Data collected in both iterations were compared in Google Maps and Google Earth, affording participants with material to analyze for making recommendations of community change that would facilitate a newly acquired form of mobility – bike-riding. Recommended neighborhood changes ranged from bicycle lanes to a “teenage-only Chuckee Cheese.” Youth produced changes to the official map in a group discussion and using Google My Maps.


This method of collecting data was not without its challenges. Participants frequently came back from activities with surprising forms of data, as when GPS loggers were not turned-on and head cameras were used as cicada-swatting mechanisms or popped-off heads during bike rides. In these instances, specific participants did not have as much “reliable” material to share with the group, or to analyze. These challenges are endemic to authoethnographic methods and re-prioritize the notion of data for teaching and learning over data for scientific research.
In addition to thinking across scales and experiences, participants learned the function and use of GPS, and other mapping technologies. In conclusion, updating a representational infrastructure with experiences from everyday life, including adroitness with associated technologies, can be taught in an immediately relevant way through youth recording and mapping their own mobility, using their communities as the geographic frame of reference for critical analysis of pathways, places, and access to resources.

Author

• Katherine Headrick Taylor, Northwestern University