Nikki Pugh, an artist, has been walking around the perimeter of the Eastiside regeration zone for the last few weeks. Armed with two GPS devices she’s built up a map of the area (GPS is notoriously inaccurate in built up areas so the lines show the discrepancies between the devices).
On Sunday she invited others to join her to take photos and generally record what they found. 18 people started the route with 7 finishing 3.5 hours later. I took my DSLR camera but also bolted the Flip video camera on the side of it so I could record my explorations from the perspective of the stills camera.
It looked like this:
Here’s me exploring a bridge on my own:
And here’s a few of us exploring the entrance to a canal:
While I was, of course, trying to take good photos the main motivation was recording so I went for quantity over quality, especially towards the end when the light was fading. There are 186 photos in the set which you can scroll through in this slideshow if you wish:
But to be honest they’re really just there for Nicky to play with. The map is pretty cool though (given the limitations of the Flickr / Yahoo map which hasn’t really kept up with developments in that area). Click on the arrow on the right of the strip of images and watch the photos crawl along the route. Magic!
For more of this nonsense (or goodsense, depending) keep tabs on Nikki’s blog.
Contrast with Flickr’s edge of Eastside http://boundaries.tomtaylor.co.uk/#20094186
When you geotag a photo, you also have an option to correct the neighbourhood, this is that data exposed in shapes. Digbeth is interesting too http://boundaries.tomtaylor.co.uk/#18172
I was going to say that’s the Old, Labour council definition of Eastside but then I had a proper look and, no, that’s just wrong. ;)
You should think about sticking all the photos into http://openstreetview.org/ – this is just the sort of dataset that John McKerrell (who started the project) is looking to capture, and would give you a different way of visualising the photos on the map.