The Photo project

This part may seem the least 'academic,' and I suppose it is, but I hope that we can build an interactive photo archive for Boone County, across the next century, to parallel other sorts of information we collect.  I don't think photos can replace written sources, nor are images really any more objective; the selection process itself--who chooses to take what image--shifts the knowledge status of any photo out of the objective.

Yet--other things are recorded in images.  Ideal, perhaps, might be that images we record provide others in some misty future with clues to life here that we have never thought to question, things that writers may simply not address.  It's hard to really "see" what we are too familiar with--the blind spots in our assumptions may say as much about us as what we actually do write down.  (And we need to make of record of who takes the photos, to be able to track those lines--I need to write about Habitation Tales soon.)

Difficult is finding an appropriate format and technology for this project.  I've got a gps digital camera now, which may or may not supply the information I want, and I hope we can get more gps cameras into our system soon.  Harder is the display.  Shannon White has suggested Google's MyMaps.  This is free and looks easy to use, but it doesn't look like it would support a project of any great size--even marking images on the maps with the pinpoints might get cluttered.  Not sure.

Just got introduced to ArcGISExplorer.  That system easily marks maps, lets us attach photos, etc.  Not sure this works as a stand-alone web page, vs. a tool to generate presentations.

What I'd like to produce, with many many others...a map of Boone County, probably a satellite image, with a road layer, addresses we could turn on, as a base for a great many gps-tagged photos and text descriptions.  We would need a way for people to zoom in on a specific area (like the box zoom in feature) or to call up photos along a certain road or in a specific neighborhood.  But then, we should also have a legend of categories people could click on to find other sets of photos.

For instance, categories such as:

• residences
• businesses
• construction
• trees
• wildflowers (I need to go out and start these photos tomorrow)
• events (like Roots and Blues, Earthday, the Hartsburg Pumpkin Festival, Art in the Park, the Ashland Rodeo...)
• weather events

People will find more ways we need to look at things.  And this also needs to be date-searchable.

So, this is a lot of work.  I don't quite know how to set it up, but this aspect would be popular, and might get some support by various groups.  E.g., in better times, real estate folks might sponser us, or the Chamber of Commerce.  Or the towns of Centralia or Harrisburg.  Or the Boone County Historical Society. And Stephens and other schools might decide they want a visual presence on this.  And I rather hope this can generate projects in classes--whether as an exercise in a future MU gps class, or in human geography, updating Carl Sauer to the digital age, or a junior high neighborhood mapping project.

Well, we'll see.

bob