On October 21, 2008, the Nationaal Archief and Spaarnestad Photo became the first Dutch heritage institutions to place a small selection of their photos on Flickr in The Commons. Within two weeks, the photostream of the Nationaal Archief had over 400,000 page views and 400 comments. These large numbers were caused by the extensive amount of attention the media dedicated to the initiative — resulting in, among other things, articles in national newspapers De Volkskrant and Het Parool, radio reporting by the Wereldomroep, and, most spectacular of all, a prime-time news item in NOS Journaal (causing page views to rise up to 100,000 in one night). This initiative was started as a pilot project to involve the broad audience in photographic collections and metadata generation. The pilot proved successful: with almost 2,000 comments and over 6,800 tags added, Nationaal Archief has incorporated the use of Flickr as a standard feature for public presentation and metadata generation.

Recently, Nationaal Archief has launched another Flickr pilot: Mapit1418.nl, an online tool aimed at collecting geographical metadata on a selection of photos from World War I. Partly thanks to The Commons, Nationaal Archief has gathered quite a lot of data on this collection, but for most of these photos the locations are unknown. With Mapit1418.nl, the archive seeks to research what significant role a geotagging game can play in adding specific knowledge to its collections.

Mapit1418.nl is a mashup of two data streams: a subset of Nationaal Archief’s Flickr photos and Open Street Map data. A new and simple website was developed as a game “shell” for the mashup. The game is simple: select a photo, study it, and add it to the (suspected) right location on the map, adding an “argument” for that location (”I recognize that bell tower in the background”) or even a photo of that same location today. Earlier locations can be overruled by every new player, but selection of the “right” location (some degree of uncertainty will always remain) is in hands of the jury: every month, from a pool of the most frequent players a jury selects a winner. He or she (we see an almost even distribution of men and women on the website) wins large reproduction of a WWI photo.

Up till now, some 50 locations have been added to the photos. Since we aim at WWI “knowledgeables”, discussion tends to develop around specific themes. Some users disagree about the origins of a certain war vessel — a phenomenon we love to observe and stongly encourage. Hopefully it will lead to a just location in the end …

www.mapit1418.nl (sorry, only in Dutch)
Open now until April 24, 2010

suggestify

Developer Aaron Straup Cope (he works at Flickr) recently released his impressive geotagging-suggestion Flickr application, Suggestify into the wild. Using this, Flickr users can suggest likely geotags for other Flickr users, including the institutions in The Commons. Aaron says,

This is a site to allow you to geotag other people’s photos on Flickr by suggesting a location to the photo’s owner. Likewise, someone else can offer you suggestions of where your un-geotagged photos were taken.

That location information is stored here until the photo’s owner approves (or rejects) the suggestion. If approved, the photo is geotagged on Flickr (using the Flickr API) and the suggestor is credited by adding a special tag to the photo.

The site is still very much in the alpha-beta-disco-disco-danceball-revolution stage. It works but if something sometimes doesn’t work, I’m not surprised. Now that the basic functionality is in place, I’m slowly going through looking for edge cases and gotchas. Please be sure to take a look at the list of known-knowns

So, anyway, I took it for a little spin up to Oregon. When entering a Flickr user or Commons’ institution name, be sure to enter it exactly as their screen name appears on Flickr. Select the photos you’d like to geotag, enter the place name on the map, and click the buttons to go go go!

Selecting the Flickr user or Commons institution

Click buttons!

We’d enjoy seeing what you end up geo-tagging in The Commons. And, yo, Commons’ institutions – why not sign-up for the service and see what users end up suggesting for your digital photographic collection?

Visit Aaron’s blog for a more in-depth look.

Yesterday, we peeked in on a day of pre-conference workshops (and wifi hunting) at Museums and the Web 2009 in Indianapolis. Today the conference got off to a big start with what word on the #mw2009 Twitter feed says was an opening plenary address by Maxwell Anderson, from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, on “moving from virtual to visceral”. The plenary address will be published, but in the meantime, here’s a teaser …

@kevinvonappen: Museums online can let visitors be voyeurs of staff? Cool #mw2009

@kresin: museums should teach how to practice connoisseurship & help people be more judicious in life choices. #mw2009

@5easypieces: Anderson: “I think museums are afraid of emotion.” #mw2009

And of course …

@mia_out: Brooklyn Museum, Te Papa ‘build a squid’, Flickr Commons getting some love in #mw2009 plenary

After that, attendees had to start choosing from four parallel sessions in the morning and afternoon, before an “unconference” portion of the conference began. (Don’t know what an unconference is? You’ll find out before long if you’re a regular conference goer!)

A Park Ranger, John Harlan Warren, presented to the conference (about video podcasting) — a first for Museums and the Web and a fresh perspective for the more traditional museum crowd, who also apparently like his hat.

But we know you want to hear about Flickr’s own Aaron Straup Cope. Aaron presented today on geocoding and storytelling, showing attendees new ways to think about user-generated data, and showing them the concept of shapefiles. Here’s what some people in Aaron’s audience learned and thought:

@frankieroberto: Aaron: “we boiled the Earth a little. Using a country > region > county > locality > neighbourhood model.” #mw2009

@mia_out: Aaron at #mw2009 ‘Every place has layers of unseen history, I’d like to believe that’s where the value is.’ Museum mapping session

@zbartrout: #mw2009 astraub of Flickr showing the inaccuracy of geocoding. Tags often reflect what people are looking at rather than where they are.

@sebchan: *Beautiful* inaccuracy aka complexity of geocoded data – Flickr shape files fantastic for community projects. #mw2009

@sebchan: Aaron Straup-Cope is hassling Guy Debord. #MW2009

@nikkitimmermans: aaron introducing the word “psychosynthography”… do not underestimate the value of geo and photosynth #mw2009

@mia_out: Aaron at #mw2009, place ‘names become the bridge between experience and the memories that we have’

Sold on geotagging yet?

More from Museums and the Web tomorrow — mini-workshops and professional forums, exhibits, and the Best of the Web Awards!