PROP FOR NAVIGATING SOCIAL SPACE
Elisabeth Davenport, Kathy Buckner and Kirsty Barr, Department of Communication and Information Studies, Queen Margaret College.
INTRODUCTION
The authors of this paper are members of Work Package 2 of the Living Memory project, funded by the ESPRIT program under the I3 rubric. Living Memory will explore new intelligent interface interaction and interaction paradigms in the context of a real community, the EH12 area of Edinburgh. WP2's concern is 'Understanding the community', and QMC's contribution is to provide ethnographic material to the other partners. Much of this process is taken up with dialogues in the locality, with individual residents with members of community groups, and with other stakeholders like traders and local government officers and elected representatives. Initial interviews with individual residents have focused on community as interaction. We are aware of a vast literature on the nature of community but that is not our concern in this paper, where we take 'community as interaction' as given and make no attempt to justify this perspective.
Under this rubric, we have tried to elicit who is significant in our respondent's lives, and how that significance is manifest (and articulated) in exchanges between respondents and their significant others. In addition, we have attempted to discover if and how respondents rank their relationships, and whether patterns of behaviour reflect such rankings in a way that allows zones of comparative significance to be identified and described in terms of attributes.