I’ve just spent the last 2 days in a workshop with Branded Meeting Places project at Edinburgh University. They have been great!! I met with a diverse group of people from a range of disciplines, yet we all had interests in common which made the group a very inspiring one.

We’d been brought  together for a workshop on tagging, looking at how these may be utilised in linking the physical world with the virtual. I’d been invited on account of my work with QR codes, and it has definitely given me a great food for thought with my own research. In particular The Branded Meeting Places group have been collaborating with Mobile Acuity who create image recognition software, to come up with Spellbinder which on their website is described as:

“..a new interactive digital medium based on camera phones and image matching. Using Spellbinder, digital content can be embedded in the real world by taking a photograph of an object or place. The digital content can be released by another user by taking another photograph of the same location. Spellbinder does not require special markers or barcodes to be placed in the world and works indoors or outdoors”

The creative scope for this is really limitless, especially when I think of it in the context of my own art practice.

On the first day we brainstormed ideas surrounding tagging. In groups we came up with possible applications of tagging and presented them to a vote to take one forward to build overnight. As it was 2 ideas were melded and three dedicated programmers worked through the night and morning to give us a working application to pay with.

The application that was built was called “Vocal Thumbs” which enables people to voice their opinions in a way which facilitates social networking via mobile phone. We were hoping to use audio, but that was not possible in the short turnaround time, but “Vocal Thumbs” worked via text messaging, so we all went out, tagged parts of Edinburgh, found each other’s tags and tested the system.

This very intensive group working to come up with a concept, build it and test it in 2 days is a very productive way of testing a concept and gaining feedback in a very short time frame. I think though, it is very reliant on the mix of people involved. Everyone there was positive,  committed to research and motivated in coming up with new ideas, and this enthusiasm was contagious. That is not to say however, at the end of each day we were a bit tired, but that good kind of tired where you feel like you’ve achieved something.

A couple of weeks ago I attend a course on Free Choice Profilng which is a research method enabling qualitative data to be quantified more “scientifically"  <! --cynical thought:  because scientific enquiry always seems to have more credibility than any other…>

Free Choice profiling was devised to determine perceived  flavours in cheeses and ports, where tasters created lists of descriptive words which they then later ranked for each cheese/ port. Rather than being a yes/ no questionnaire or having terms defined by the researcher, the participants determined the terms to be used (hence the term “free choice profiling). This then has the potential to have a wider range of definitions and terms which may not occur to the researcher. The results are then calculated using GenStat (statistics package) with some customised software to establish areas of consensus amongst participants.

This method can be seen as wholistic rather than reductionist because the results process looks at areas of consensus as opposed to areas of difference. If you think of the classic placebo effect tests, they are usually searching for differences in the participants results to ascertain whether there is anything of significance going on.
But of course you can’t apply such methods to things like tasting wine and cheese, where it make more sense to work on  areas of consensuses where a critical mass of participants are holding similar views.

Dr Francoise Wemelsfelder has been a pioneer in using this methodology, particularly in areas of animal welfare, with the use of videos of livestock animals. Whilst I still have my reservations about the use of the technique in this way being anthropomorphic (attributing human emotions to animals), the actual process and Wemelsfelder’s use of visual material is for me an excellent  means finding answers to some questions my research has been asking.

Although I am an artist, I am the type of person who wants to be able to have repeatable results to illustrate my points. Free Choice Profiling is perhaps one way I can do this, given that the nature of my work is so subjective and based on people’s interpretations and emotional responses to images.