The project itself was originally dreamt up in October 2023. This happened after walking through Cork City with my mother who had lived in Cork almost her entire life and had been to cork city countless times. In all the times she was there she was surprised to learn the location of JJ Walshs’ on Oliver Plunkett street.
This made me aware of the fact that this could be a major issue in terms of tourists and visitors coming to the cork area. Originally then the plan was to build a navigation app that would give you a notification for when you were near an interesting location or area of Cork city so that tourists and visitors would not miss out on it.
After some thinking I realized that for the time frame I was working with and with my own technical limitations that the app and its scope may be too challenging. Therefore I decided to switch to doing Kinsale as not only was it a smaller area but also due to me living their since I was 5 it allowed me to be able to now most areas to include on the map with my own local knowledge. Kinsale would also prove an interesting way to plug the gap in research around local knowledge in villages that I found with minimal research being done in developed countries.
However upon more reflection and reading/research I realised two things. Firstly was that an interactive map would be better than some navigation notification tool and that secondly I could not just rely on my own local knowledge. To ammend these issues I firstly decided to use GoogleMyMaps. It was a simple and easy to use and made the artefact creation quite simple allowing me to focus moreso on the quality of the information on the map. To get the map information interviews were carried out with people in Kinsale ranging from historians, local salesmen, and regular people who have just lived in the town for varying amounts of time.
Once the information was collected it was added to the map as supplementary information on top of the information that google already provided.