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Bridging
the Rural Divide
This page pulls together the resesarch that was carried out as part of the Platform funded Rural Computing Scoping study.
Platform bid EPSRC Ref: EP/F03038X/1 The Challenge of Widespread Ubiquitous Computing
The visualisation button links to an initial exploration in terms of geo-visualising captured sensor data, while the report gives an
overview of the project, existing sensor technologies, literature and geo-visualisation tools.
This page pulls together the resesarch that was carried out as part of the Platform funded Rural Computing Scoping study.
Platform bid EPSRC Ref: EP/F03038X/1 The Challenge of Widespread Ubiquitous Computing
The visualisation button links to an initial exploration in terms of geo-visualising captured sensor data, while the report gives an
overview of the project, existing sensor technologies, literature and geo-visualisation tools.
The Inital Concept
Brief
Summary
The
value of this study lies in the application of ubiquitous computing to
rural settings. The vast majority of technological research prior to
this has largely focused on urban areas. This is largely a result of
the logistics and difficulties of deploying technologies in rural
settings, along with problems that are associated with landscape and
network coverage. Mobile platforms and local sensor networks now make
it possible to explore the development of ubiquitous computing
applications to support rural experiences.
This project takes spatiality as its core theme and seeks to explore the heterogeneity of social meanings that populate the rural landscape. The project specifically seeks to explore the development of a ubicomp experience that enables rural inhabitants, communities, visitors, and professional bodies to represent, share, and evolve their understandings of place through the collaborative construction of a digital landscape that reflects and augments the different local knowledge and understandings of place ‘at work’ in the countryside. The project seeks to develop online-layered maps, situated displays and live feeds that enable local understandings of place to be published and accessed ‘off-site’ via the web and ‘on-site’ via mobile phones. The emerging digital landscape will represent archival and real time knowledge of place. Layers of knowledge may span local social, historical, and natural understandings of place from the various perspectives of the stakeholders involved. Thus, and for example, biologists or archaeologists working for various rural organizations may populate maps with scientific information regarding local flora and fauna or sites of historical interest; local people might layer indigenous meanings onto these to build up representations of the local community’s understanding of place, and visitors might access and add to these understandings as they roam around rural space. The data populating the maps will generated through professional bodies and through public use of online and ubicomp technology. The online system might allow users to scan in photos and video, to locate them on an online map, and/or to add a narrative. Users might also be able to sketch routes out to indicate interesting pathways through rural space. The ‘sketching’ might be augmented by GPS data gathered in the field. When in the field users might subscribe to RSS-type feeds (based on layers that are of personal interest) to have local knowledge fed to them at appropriate points in their journey. They might add to the evolving corpus of local knowledge themselves, uploading content via mobile phones. Visitor centres may also be factored into the experience, not only to promote awareness of and participation in the experience, but by representing local knowledge on situated displays to convey, for example, the day’s sightings of birds in an area or flowers or other interesting flora and fauna seen by people in the field. Key
challenges revolve around creating online and real time data, layering
data, and accessing data in the field. The project will seek to exploit
online mechanisms alongside sensor-based and experiential data gathered
by users in the field. Sensor data may relate, for example, to local
weather conditions, the movement and tracking of wildlife, the ways in
which visitors move around a location and the emergent ‘focal’ points
of a place. These may be complemented by scientific data generated by
professional bodies and a wide range of experiential data generated by
local people and visitors alike. These might include, for example, the
recollections people they have of place, the experiences they have, the
places they have gone to, they things they see there, etc. In other
words, the emerging digital landscape might reflect and augment the
heterogeneity of meanings that rural space has for the people who
populate it.
This project was directed by: Alan Chamberlain and Andy Crabtree The technical leads were: Mark paxton and Duncan Rowland |
