I am more than happy (pun intended!) to pass on this message from Tanya Notly from the University of Western Sydney, who is embarking on a project to map young people's happiness, as a way to contribute to their well-being and ultimately help with suicide prevention.
She is looking for (geospatial) people to help them out with setting up mapping technologies.
Sound interesting? Of course it does!
Read Tanya's message below, and please spread the word!
We only have a small budget but we are looking for a technologist to help us develop a mapping project between now and September. Our project will work with young people in Paramatta to map their emotional responses to public spaces in the city in order to start a dialogue about how different environments in the city impacts on the wellbeing of young people. We’d like to use mapping software to do this and expect we will want to link this to related work that supports young people to share creative content relating to these places.
We know about (and were initially inspired by) online emotional mapping projects like We Feel Fine <http://wefeelfine.org/> or Christian Nold’s emotional mapping work. But we want to create a project that is place-based, not that scrapes online data (though I know Nold’s work does not do this). Ideally inputs could be made via an app and the web (perhaps also via SMS).
We’d also ideally like to use open source software and to create something fairly simple that we can keep building on with future projects. I’d be especially keen to talk to anyone who is familiar with Ushahidi and their latest releases to see if this may be relevant.
The results of this mapping will be exhibited as part of a festival in October 2015.
Dr. Tanya Notley
Lecturer, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney.
Digital Humanities Group member
video4change network researcher
t.notley@uws.edu.au
Twitter: @tattinot
