I’ve long been an advocate of folksonomies. It allows the wider community to add knowledge to resources through tags and comments, ultimately making things easier to find. A number of institutions have allowed free tagging of certain resources for a while now, such as the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, the collective STEVE museum, and of course, Wessex Archaeology’s photos on Flickr.
It seems that this idea is slowly taking off. Flickr have just announced “The Commons” project. Flickr’s blog post about this project is entitled “Many hands make light work“, which just about sums it up, really. I urge you to read it.
The Library of Congress in the USA have teamed up with Flickr to put a selection (currently about 3,000 photos from their collection of 14+ million) online. If you have a free Flickr account, you will be able to tag these photos and comment on them. The images are also being geotagged by the LoC staff. The idea of a temporal map view comes to mind…
There are two main aims to The Commons project, starting with the pilot: firstly, to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world, and secondly, to facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search.
This could be amazing. I’ll re-quote this snippet from Flickr’s blog:
“..the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search.”
This will ultimately benefit not just users of Flickr, but any user of the LoC catalogue. It won’t replace the knowledge of their expert cataloguers, but complement it. This is a great example of how this approach can work both ways to benefit everyone. Read the Library of Congress‘ take on the project.
After all, it’s everyone’s past, isn’t it?
Silbury Hill, Wiltshire
Hosted on
Zooomr
There’s one thing that Flickr doesn’t support natively, and that is the ability to ‘geotag’ photos. In a nutshell, geotagging is just associating spatial data (i.e. a set of coordinates) showing where you took a particular photo (or where the subject is located). You could then see where it was taken on a map, or browse photos via a mapping service such as Google Maps.
A number of determined people have written hacks to get geotagging into Flickr. But these often use a plugin for Firefox called Greasemonkey, and a further set of scripts to build in the functionality into your photo pages. If you’re not technically minded, it’s not easy to do, and I think that most people will be put off by this approach.
If you do use extensions such as GMiF, coordinates are stored in with your tags, so your tag lists will eventually become cluttered with tags such as “geotagged” and “geo:lat=51.519606″ etc. It’s not very elegant, but it does work.
Step in Zooomr.
Zooomr have built geotagging right into the heart of the system, with elegance. Your geotags are nicely hidden away (but still accessible). Viewing where photos were taken, or simply browsing photos by location on a map are all built-in, and very easy to use. Not to mention kind to the eyes.
Zooomr doesn’t yet have the community aspect that Flickr does. Community is what makes Flickr so brilliant, and it is now very well established. I think that startups like Zooomr fill a nice gap at the moment, and help to keep giants like Flickr innovating and on their toes.
Good luck Zooomr!
Despite the wealth of photographs on Flickr that are tagged with archaeology, there didn’t appear to be a group for it, so, without further ado, I’d like to present the new Archaeology group on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/archaeology/
At the moment, it’s invite only, to try and get some high quality photos on it as a base, but it will be opened up eventually. If you’d like to join, pop over to the group page and put in a request.
The group is limited to 25 images per month, to encourage people to pick the cream of their photos, rather than a habitual place to dump them, which happpens far to often in many other groups.
I visited Stonehenge this morning to watch the winter solstice sunrise. English Heritage opened the monument for a couple of hours, and a few hundred people came up to celebrate, wander, and absorb the atmosphere. It was a bit foggy, and it wasn’t until about 20 minutes or so after sunrise that we first got a glimpse of the sun, shrouded in cloud. All in all, it was a very relaxed experience compared with summer solstice, when tens of thousands gather for sunrise.
Of course, Stonehenge has some interesting solar alignments. But as far as I know, winter solstice sunrise isn’t one of them! It’s winter solstice sunset that is interesting. Head over to Alun’s archaeoastronomy site to find out more about solar alignments at Stonehenge.
A picture, as it is said, can say a thousand words. My “Winter Solstice at Stonehenge” set is now up on Flickr.
Technorati Tags: archaeology, wintersolstice, solstice, stoneage, stonehenge, winter solstice
