Sunday 26 April 2015

Finished!


It’s finished! I now have a complete working patch to run my exhibit. I had to give back the Makey Makey, but the patch will still work by pressing the space bar (although the water bottle does complete the look).

The Final Arrangement

The Max patch runs the exhibit while the Makey Makey acts as the interface. The circuit board is hooked up to the computer and alligator clips connect the circuit board to the foil wrapped board on top of the water bottle. To control the exhibit, the user holds the ground cord and touches the foil wrapped board, which takes the place of the space bar. This is meant to simulate the action of pumping water. The space bar then sends a signal to the patch to light up the designated pump and play the sound clip attached to it. If you look closely in the water, you can see little white bits (croissant bits) that represent the “white flocculent bits” that Dr. John Snow saw in the cholera infected water of the Broad Street Pump. (Summers, Judith. Soho -- A History of London's Most Colourful Neighborhood, Bloomsbury, London, 1989. http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/broadstreetpump.html)

My "pump"


To finish the patch for the presentation, I had to combine the various test patches I made while figuring out the sound clips, the light delays and the counter used to turn everything on at the right time. I also had to print the map to the right size to fit my screen. This took a little while, but I had a friend (check out her project; it’s really fun) help me figure the sizing of the map so it would print properly. The map ended up being smaller then my screen, but it still worked. Once I had the map attached to my screen, I had to arrange all the lights so they would show up in the proper positions. To do this each pump had it’s own collection of buttons and wires which included a toggle switch, the delay mechanism, and the lights. Underneath the first light, I connected the play list filled with my sound clips. Each segment was then connected to the counter, which would turn on one group of lights at a time. Out of all the wires, buttons, and messages, only the lights are seen in presentation mode.

Top: Tons of criss-crossing wires, buttons, and messages
Bottom: Nice and clean presentation mode

My presentation went well, even with a few minor issues. The various parts were easy to set up, and it was fun to show my off my work. However, there are a few things I would do differently if I refined this project for an actual museum exhibit. My first problems involved the size of the map and organizing the lights. Positioning the lights underneath the map was difficult because they tended to move around when I locked and unlocked the patch. This meant a lot of tinkering to make sure everything was in the right place. I also couldn’t figure out how to get the right size of paper to fully cover my computer screen. Both problems would be solved if I could use a digital copy of the map and overlaid it on the patch. My second problem involved the counter that controlled when the lights turned on and off. If I continued the project, I would insert a reset switch to restart the patch from the beginning, rather then have it reverse through the light sets. 

I have learned a lot with this project. I had never used any visual coding program before, so was completely new to Max. Our professor gave me a lot of help, while some other things I figured out for myself. On the content side, I learned more about the map and the cholera epidemic that has interested me for a while. Combining the two experiences, I learned a lot about how to present events like these in an engaging way. If this project was an actual museum exhibit, there should be a short interpretive panel on the side or a screen before the user enters the exhibit to contextualize the map and explain the aftermath of the epidemic. All in all, I enjoyed the chance to learn a completely new way of presenting information.

Wednesday 25 March 2015

Progress!


When I started on the programming for the lights, our professor told me to describe the actions of my program in plain English and translate that into coding. So here is what I want my program to do:

1. The user walks up to the computer. Each main pump is already lit up on screen.
2. The user presses the physical pump to navigate from pump to pump.
3. At each pump, the cholera cases light up one at a time.
4. Once all the cases have lit up, a sound clip starts playing, or it can play over the lights turning on; I haven’t decided yet.
5. The lights stay on until the user moves to the next pump.
6. The program ends at Broad Street.

It took a little while (and a lot of questions), but I figured out how to make all this work in Max. There are settings to turn the main lights on when the program loads; settings to delay the lights so they turn on one after another; settings to link the physical pump (I haven’t made this yet) to the computer; and settings to link the sound clips to the lights. Over the last two classes, I made a basic patch and connected it to the Makey Makey circuit I mentioned in my last post.

Screenshot of max patch

Now that I have a basic patch, I have to repeat this set up for all five of the pumps on the map, so that the lights shine underneath my copy of the map. I hit a stumbling block with figuring out how to turn off the lights when the user moved to the next pump. However, I realized it would actually look better if all the lights stayed on, because it gives the impression of the disease spreading over time.
  
Now that I have the mechanics of the exhibit, I need to work on the content. I have to do some research to find information for the introduction and conclusion that will frame the exhibit. To find editorials for the sound clips, I will go through a British newspaper database and pull interesting articles. Then, I’ll get some of my friends to read them out for me, and upload it to the program. And I still have to make the physical pump for the interface.

Apart from the mechanics of the project, I also learned more about the map. It's a lot smaller then I originally thought. I thought it covered all of London, but its actually only a small section covering a few blocks around the diseased pump, or at least that’s what published.






Monday 2 March 2015

Maps and Screens: The New Plan

Plans for this project are coming into focus. We’ve reached the part of the class where we’ve finished learning Max programming and now we’re just going to work on our projects. I came out of our consultations with a much firmer idea of what I want to do for the project. One cool discovery was that the Map and Data Centre at the Weldon library has a copy of Snow’s cholera map that I can use for my project. I’m going to see if I can get a large transparency of the map from the library and attach it to the screen of my computer. Then I could program the screen to light up underneath different parts of the map; highlighting whatever point I want to show. This idea works way better then my original plan. Originally, I was going to connect a physical map with lights punched through it to a computer and program the lights to light up specific pumps. Separate from the map, the computer would show images and play sound clips. Using a transparency against a screen eliminates the need for extra lights, and makes the display simpler. I can use the computer to light up the map, and get the sound to play from the same device, which is closer to the effect I wanted to achieve then with the other version. This effect, voices from behind images and lights, was inspired by something I saw in Scotland at the Culloden Battlefield Visitor’s Centre. Part of their exhibit had screens with silhouettes, and speakers in the ceiling that would tell their stories. 

 
A very cool way to exhibit stories.

I have no where near enough experience or room to do something like that, but I can still use sound clips and images. For my project, I’ll have someone read editorials about the effects of cholera that are linked to different pumps. I’m also going to use different coloured lights for the healthy and diseased pumps. Then, if I figure it out, I could maybe even put images behind the map, although that might be hard to see behind the lines of the map.

Once I have the screen figured out, I’ll make the interface. I’m going to use Makey Makey, a recyclable play set and circuit board, to build a physical pump that will be used to navigate the map. Each time someone pumps the handle; the program will take them to a different pump on the map. I still haven’t decided if I want to put a bottle of murky water underneath the pump to add to the display. The bottle would only be for display, because making an actual pump would be too ambitious, so it might not be useful, but I’ll think about that at a later stage.

Besides the programming aspect of the project, (which I’m going to have to learn how to do) I think the hardest part will be not going overboard on content. The focus of this project is geared toward the interactive activity, not the content. I’ll have to take care not to spend too much time on research, and avoid ignoring the programming part of the project. This might actually be a blessing in disguise. I think a lot of the content I wanted to include might not be available online. For each pump, I wanted to include a neighbourhood profile, the status of the pump, and a sound clip describing the experience of the disease. Now reviewing this idea, it was probably a little ambitious. I still want to include some of this information, but I think I’ll restrict it to certain pumps over others. How I choose which pumps will depend on what information I can find. Using the school’s newspaper database, I’ll be able to find editorials on the disease, but whether I’ll be able to tie it to a neighbourhood is doubtful. It’s more likely that I’ll find editorials for the city in general. I still want to turn the editorials into sound clips, but I’ll have to figure out a way to tie them to the different pumps. On top of this, I’d like to include an introduction to the epidemic, including how it was spread, the effect and the treatments doctors used to combat the disease. This will be basic though, to avoid going too deep into content.

            So now that I have a plan, my first step is to contact the Map and Data Centre and find out if I can get a transparency of the Snow map made.

Sunday 1 February 2015

New Semester, New Course


Switching courses for the new semester, this blog will now discuss my Interactive Exhibit Design course. This course is the companion to the Digital History course last semester. The main goal of this course is to produce an interactive multimedia exhibit using anything we can think of. Our professor encourages us to think big and if it fails we still get the marks for trying something completely new, rather then playing it safe. This course will be going even farther out of my comfort zone then the previous course, but three weeks in it already seems like it will be very interesting.

So far we’ve started learning the programming language for Max 7, a program that was designed for use with midi music programs. The program allows us to develop patches to link to buttons, leds, counters, sliders and more we probably haven’t learned yet. These virtual buttons etc. can be linked to physical partners, or sensors that can be used to create interactive programs, games, or music among other things. Other programs or elements were going to learn about before starting our projects include sensors, desktop fabrication, MakeyMakey and a bunch of other things. The second half of the course is devoted completely to working on our projects ending with a demonstration day.

We had a brief brainstorming session in one of our last classes discussing preliminary ideas for our projects, and getting some feedback from our professor. For the base of my project I want to use a map that was developed by Dr. John Snow, a doctor from the first half of the 19th century, to track the outbreaks of cholera in London, England (I’ve mentioned this map in one of my earlier posts.) This map helped prove the validity of germ theory by linking the outbreak of cholera to a specific pump in Broad Street. For the first step of my project, I’d like to transfer the map to fabric and insert lights that can track the cases of the disease back to its source with the push of a button. As a second step, our professor suggested a way to make the map more interactive. I could include physical pumps connected to sensors or some program that users could pull on, and the program would tell them if the pump they were using was contaminated or not. I could also include information on how patients would be treated, and the likelihood of survival. This part would give users more of an understanding of how people lived in different parts of the city during epidemics. The exhibit could end with a description of any changes to Public Health policies as a result of the epidemic. I’m not quite sure how I will accomplish this yet, but it will be interesting to figure out how to make it work.

The connection between public health, treatments of diseases and changing medical theories has interested me for a long time, and I think it would be fun to try and translate this interest into an exhibit format.