 Kia kato. We're here from the Arts Digital Lab at the University of Canterbury and we're going to be telling you about the Understanding Place project and the Red Zone Stories app that we've developed for that project. I'm Jennifer Middendorf. I'm the manager of Digital Lab and with me I've got Samuel Hope and Jennifer Rees who are our digital content analysts. So Samuel's going to be talking about some of the background to the project and the theoretical ground it comes out of. Jenny is going to be talking about the more technical aspects and how we actually built this app. And then finally I'm going to tell you about some of the lessons we learnt in the course of the project. So I'll hand over to Samuel now. Kia kato, nami hima hana. Thanks, NDF, for inviting us to talk today. So as Jennifer said, I'm one of the digital project specialists at the UC Arts Digital Lab alongside Jenny and we have been employed to work on a National Science Challenge funded research project called Understanding Place. So Understanding Place is a part of building better homes, towns and cities which is a small contestable fund that was started up in October of last year and we'll be running through to June of 2019. So this particular challenge invites participants to respond to changing conditions in New Zealand's urban and built environments. Our project Understanding Place offers a cultural perspective on the issues presented by Christchurch's post-disaster urban landscape. Many of these issues have been covered extensively in the media, for example the loss, displacement, dislocation, fractured memory, both individual and collective. And we're in many ways focusing on an urban landscape which is characterised by a loss or an absence. We're focusing on landscapes that have been red-zoned and houses have been removed from them. So Understanding Place therefore seeks to develop approaches for capturing and representing multiple meanings and histories in these landscapes that have been abandoned or have had homes removed from them. So I'll just give you a start-off, talk about our research aims. Firstly we want to capture regeneration narratives in red-zoned areas of Ōtatahi Christchurch, in particular the residential red zone which I'll describe in detail shortly. In doing so we want to present not just one but many stories and many narratives of quite effective spaces in the city and connect up what we've been calling micro-stories. As a part of this we also want to foreground the stories of Māori and include the mana whenua story as a layer on a cultural map of the city. So we found the best way of approach of doing this was to build an app that people could take out into the field and use in situ, use in their spaces and explore them and use the app to record their stories. So I'll just play a little short video of us taking a early prototype of that out into the field and describe a little bit about this space. So this is the residential red zone which is probably not too familiar to people outside Christchurch but you may have heard about it in the media. It's this kind of 630 hectare large space of land which resides in the east of Christchurch and in truth there's not just one residential red zone but many red zones. There's some on the Port Hills which is on the Banks Peninsula and some to the north of Christchurch as well. This space once housed over 5,000 residents. There was after the earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 there was a big push by Sierra which is Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority to do something with this land because it had been severely damaged by the quakes and was considered red-zoned and unable to be built on in the short to medium term. So as of I think 2012 there was a large project to start removing homes from this land and in total the government bought, purchased and removed 5,422 houses which is you'll see the sort of traces of these spaces and here's us testing it in the field at the moment. So as part of this project we linked up with some collaborators and partners. One of them for the funding set up by National Science Challenge we had to select a real end user and for us that was Regenerate Christchurch who are the successor to Sierra and Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority and they have really taken hold over the planning and consultation over what is going to happen with this space in the next 10 years or so. So alongside Regenerate Christchurch we also sought out the Ngai Tahu Research Centre which is based at the University of Canterbury. Tamari Tau who is the Orpuku or the leader of Ngai Tua Hureti which is the hapu which has mana whenua status in our part of Christchurch. They came on board with us and offered up their own story of this space. So we wanted to tell these multiple narratives of this space and get as many different views as possible and when we approached Tamari we said well what are the Māori perspectives how do we engage Māori to do this and he said well there's not one single there's not many Māori stories about this place necessarily but there's the one hapu story the one Ngai Tua Hureti story so we're just in the process of going through and getting a video which will plot on this map and show throughout the residential red zone so I'll just pass over to Jenny now who's going to showcase the app a little bit and you'll get a sense of how it will fit together. Thank you, hi I'm Jenny I'm one of the team in that digital lab you see as well I'm going to give you a bit of an overview of the technologies behind the red zone stories app and show you some screenshots I'm not going to go into a huge amount of technical detail so feel free if that's your thing to come up and ask us more questions at the end so red zone stories made up of two parts is the app that's primarily the data gathering tool and there'll be a website that goes with it that will be for storing and displaying the data the app is built using Ionic which is an open source framework for building hybrid or cross-platform apps it describes itself as the dev-friendly app platform for building cross-platform apps with one code base for any device with the web building a hybrid app meant we could use our existing experience with website development and we didn't need to create and manage separate native code bases for Android and also iOS Ionic provided a lot of tools that help speed up the development such as being able to preview the app in a web browser as we built it and to quickly deploy the app to real devices for testing as well it also comes with a library of front-end building blocks such as buttons, form fields, page loading, spinners all those things you expect to see in an app so we didn't need to reinvent the wheel for the user interface we did need to extend Ionic with a few plugins to achieve some functionality most importantly accessing the device's camera and the GPS location data which is critical to the project so once a user has used the app to record their story and submitted it, it sent to the website site of Red Zone Stories the website is built using Drupal also an open source project Drupal had the REST API tools we needed to have the app talk to the website as well as being a user and content management system people can also will be able to submit their stories through the website if they can't make it to the Red Zone themselves once enough data has been collected the website will display analytical and visualisations for the use of both researchers and for the general public who have been contributing for the maps which you'll see in a moment we've used the leaflet JavaScript library along with map box and data from open street maps and land information New Zealand some imagery layers that you'll see in a moment and we're capturing and displaying users traces of their movements as they walk around the Red Zone using the GeoJSON format I've just forgotten completely about the slides I'll bring them up now so that's Ionic on the left there previewing how the homepage of the app looks on Android, iOS and Windows and on the right a sort of high level architecture diagram of what's involved so this is the map as the main interface of the app and when you're out in the Red Zone you'll be able to toggle on the layers at the top there the one on the left there is from before the earthquakes and the one on the right is from two or three years ago the 2015-16 era the Red Zone area marked out in the red once you've logged in you have the option to record a journey or a story it's sort of been using both words interchangeably by hitting the button in the bottom left there it will check at that point that you're actually in or near the Red Zone and give the option to start flagging places, a little flag icon or take photos or record video and at that point once you're recording it's also keeping track of where you're moving to draw a line of your movements on the map the flag option allows people just to say this place is important to me and to explain why but they don't necessarily need to take a photo or upload a video and after taking a photo or a video or flagged a place is important we're asking people to enter a little bit of metadata just to tell us why that's important maybe what it is if they've taken a photo and add some tags as well you can see on the right those are sort of a sample of the sort of things we expect people might use and those will come through and the analytical features will come later on once you've finished recording your journey you'll be able to have a look at all the things that you've recorded maybe delete a photo or a video if you've had second thoughts about it and on the right there is just a scroll down view of the same page that shows recorded trace that's not in the Red Zone it's at the University campus but it gives you an idea of the kind of data that we'll be collecting of where people have walked or biked or driven while they've been wandering around it gets a bit jagged closer to the buildings I think out in the open where the curved lines are gets a lot clearer and then people can upload to the website once they're happy with that that's everything for me, thank you so all of this might have inspired you to maybe build your own app because we've made it sound so easy well I'm going to tell you about some of the challenges we faced along the way and the lessons we learnt we definitely bid off way more than we could chew with this project as Jenny said building an app in Iona is actually pretty easy for the basic stuff but it was some of those details that got really hard Jenny and Samuel have actually banned me from ever using the phrase theory it shouldn't be too hard because it always is just one example recording audio you'd think that would be something really simple especially on a phone but it turns out that recording audio is really hard because every model of phone has a different built in voice recorder so what works on one phone is not going to work at all on another there was a lot of problems like that so a few months out from our proposed launch date we were starting to panic we had an ever growing to-do list and the bugs just kept getting worse and that's when we made what I think is the most important decision of this entire project which was to admit we were in over our heads admitting that let us stop trying to do the impossible but instead pause for breath, step back and look at the research aims of the project and we asked ourselves what's the minimum we could launch with and still meet those aims so audio doesn't work well, video ironically is really easy to do and it achieves the same aim of letting our participants tell their stories orally so we scrapped audio altogether and we just stuck to video and we did the same thing with all of our to-do lists we went through and we divided it into the must-haves the things that this app just wouldn't work without and the nice-to-haves which we put aside and said we'll work on that later we just concentrated all our effort on the must-haves the other really big thing we decided to do was to bring in some external help getting our data from someone's phone into the database turned out to be difficult if we wanted to do it securely we could do it but there's a lot of security issues there but we don't want our participants or the university to be at risk of hacking or data loss and we just couldn't figure out how to do that so we decided to outsource that part because we couldn't put it on the nice-to-have list the whole point of the project is collecting data we kind of had to do it now we already had a really good relationship with Catalyst IT and Jonathan's over in the corner there and because they had worked on the Quake Studies project which some of you might have heard us talk about that in previous years so we went to Catalyst and we said can you build the database side of this app take that off our hands and we'll carry on with all the other stuff and that worked out really well now of course we were only able to do this because we had a budget for it right from the start we budgeted in the possibility of needing external help and that's probably the biggest lesson I want you to take away from here is that when you're taking on something totally new like this plan to fail make sure that your budget and your deadlines can cope with things being a whole load harder than you expected them to be but alongside the technical difficulties we also had the usual practical problems that any big project has biggest of which was a key staff member left which put us behind by several months while we recruited a replacement for him and that delay moved our launch date right into the middle of the time when Regenerate Christchurch would be doing their consultation and proposed uses for the Avan o Takaro River corridor Regenerate were understandably concerned that this might cause some confusion with the public if they had a consultation going on at the same time as we're gathering data on the same area so they said to us, well just postpone your launch until February we couldn't do that because we actually have to start gathering our data now so we're going to meet the output deadlines that were set by the National Science Challenge so our solution was to split our data gathering into two phases in phase one which starts this weekend we are going out to community groups to marae to rest homes places where we can get a group of participants together we can go through the consent process and teach them how to use the app and most importantly we can make sure they are really clear about the difference between our project which is research and Regenerate's consultation so that keeps Regenerate happy and it also means we can start collecting data straight away and it has the bonus that we can collect data from some key groups like Māori and Pacifica the elderly who might otherwise be underrepresented in our data in February we're going to launch phase two and phase two we'll release the app on the Google Play Store for anyone to download you'll only be able to use it if you're in Christchurch but anyone can download it people can then just download sign the online consent form and go and start recording data and we've got that extra little bit of time between now and February when we can start working on those nice to haves and maybe get a few of them back in there so what we recommend building your own app yes but be realistic about the size of the job you're taking on plan for failure be prepared to scale back if you have to and don't be ashamed if you need to ask for help and I've done the same thing I forget which slide I'm on now we're about to open up the floor for questions but before we do I'd just like to acknowledge Donald Matheson who's the principal investigator on the Understanding Place project and of course the Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities National Science Challenge say that three times fast who are the funders of this project thank you so we've got a roving microphone if anyone has any questions I'm sorry, do any research prior to understand if an app was the best way to gather these stories and if audiences would actually want to use an app? Yeah, so there was a bit of initial research which mainly was just compiling of everything that was out there we used we looked at a few key texts one of them was Hyper Cities which is this text by a couple of digital humanities scholars out of Harvard and they they had done a project prior which was cultural maps of various different cities like there's one in the Philippines so there's the old heritage sector in the Philippines and they looked at how different people engage with those platforms so we looked to these sort of cultural mapping projects coming out of universities we also looked at what's called volunteer geographic surveys so these are often run by sort of urban developers or government organisations to try and extract data from citizens about what they think about certain developments in the city and the third thing was looking at participatory archival practice so there's this text called archive everything mapping the everyday which came out a couple of years ago by Gabriela Gianacci and she talks about archives 3.0 which was this kind of participatory reflex of user generated kind of archive where people were describing things themselves and really curating the archive in a way that's meaningful to them so our project sits in between these different things the kind of thick or the cultural mapping the volunteer geographic survey and the participatory archive and the app side of things is we wrestled with all sorts of accessibility problems and I don't think it's ever going to be perfect I mean there's lots of people but currently we're going to roll out an Apple version early next year but so there's technological issues there but also we want to reach different generations as well and that's obviously going to be a problem as we go out to community groups and some of them will have higher digital literacy some won't so that's why we've done this stage as well where we go out and sit down with communities and walk them through it I don't know if we mentioned there's also a website version as well so that's for people that don't have or not in Christchurch have moved elsewhere that can contribute to it that way I think the other key thing about using an app is that it lets us really pinpoint where the important because this is as Samuel said a massive area of land and so by using the app and people having to actually move through that space we can see where the important places are and that's something that's not easily measured by just saying where do you think is important you get more of a sense of that from people actually going out into the space and how they move through that space What sort of repository do you envisage this being housed in in the future and what sort of systems are in place in terms of technology and that sort of thing to keep it from coming obsolete At the moment and for the first probably two years of its life it's going to sit in that Drupal repository and catalyst of providing some support to us to make sure that that's going to keep updated At the end of the life of the project we're going to transfer everything over into quake studies so it will then be available in quake studies in Seismic and in digital New Zealand so anyone else? I also forget to mention that Jenny has a version of the app on her tablet which works in Wellington so it's a special demo version so if anyone wants to have a look at what it actually looks like in practice just talk to Jenny later