Photo x Time x Place
16 Jul
A couple of months ago I peeked in on the public demo portion of a Tech x Journalism iPad app developing workshop given by Hacks/Hackers. While most of the apps were useful in a way that didn’t really push the envelope that much, one that wasn’t so realized stuck with me the most. It’s called Ephemera – the idea is to insert user generated visual info into Google Maps.
The idea is specifically centered around ephemera like menus and event posters that have some sort of nostalgia value or are quaint to look at, but to me the broader idea is more interesting. How can we organize and make searchable not just ephemera but photos of locations in a way that is easy to search on the time dimension? Don’t you wish you could go to Google Maps and enable some sort of historical search that would tell you whether your dry cleaners used to be an independent arts space?
Maybe I’m assuming this is more appealing than it actually is, but I think it would be very powerful to search visually by time as well as space. It’d certainly be useful to some extent in researching cultural topics, serving as a sort of window into spatially overwritten history. It’s not applicable to the far past, but I wish it was – I was researching the John Day fossil beds before my Yellowstone trip and wanted to focus on the period of time from 20 to 14 million years ago. It was surprisingly hard to narrow down results in any meaningful way. (Too bad the Google search parameters don’t allow you to enter millions of years… What websites were the apatosaurs community reading?)
With something like this though, execution is key; I don’t think we can just lay Flickr over Maps and leave the viewer to sort through thousands of photos per address. Wiki time indexed database of photos?
