SoPG: Yamanote, revisited

With one thing and another I’ve been spending a lot of time recently working on different aspects of the Sites of Potentiality Guidebooks series.

As well as developing projects to keep pushing the format in new directions, I’ve been looking at how best to present last year’s Yamanote Line project.

Although most of my documentation at the time was done via photography (and a couple of dozen of rather nice tickets – man! I love that silky black finish on the back!) I really don’t want it to turn into some sort of photography project.

So far I have 2 possible solutions…

The first is a website style format where selected photos are presented alongside bilingual word-pictures of each walk. It’s good in that it goes some way to convey the sense of journey and experience, but I feel it’s still quite a passive mode of consumption.

I’m carefully describing them as website style because I’d choose to display them under very particular conditions where I can control the appearance. Normally I’d be a lot more inclusive with my web design, but this is me in prima donna control freak mode. So there.

To aid the feedback process though, I’ve uploaded the pages for the first day’s walks so you can have a look here. A change-log can be found at the bottom of this page.

The pages were designed to be viewed in Firefox (available here) with all navigation bars removed, in full screen mode and at a screen resolution of 1024 x 768px.

[Internet Explorer does its own thing and adds in a load of visual elements I don’t want ranging from vertical scrollbars through to blue borders around images. I’m PC-based, but a quick test in Firefox for Mac suggests there may be slight issues with variations in the positioning of the text. YMMV]

Here’s a screenshot of what I see. (Click for larger version)

Okachimachi

Solution 2 is performance based:

The time taken to do a complete circuit of the Yamanote line by train is about an hour. With 29 stations that’s a couple of minutes per station. Or, alternatively, a couple of minutes per walk.

During off-peak times, I think a carriage on a Yamanote line train would make the perfect venue for a presentation of the project: in sync with the different locations as myself and my audience (a mixture of pre-arranged and incidental) travel from station to station.

Here’s a draft version of how it might sound…

[audio:http://www.npugh.co.uk/media/yamanote_stories.mp3]

Change-log:

We shall not cease from exploration…

  • The found translation for the T.S. Eliot quote:

    We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time.

    has been changed from:

    私達は調査から終わり、
    すべての私達の探検の終わりは私達が着くこと始まった、