I thought I would just share with you some new tools that I have been asked to find out about in relation to a local archive project that is looking at a particular street in Coventry and it history, communities and usage past and present.

The outline with links to useful tools and approaches is below:

The living memory archive offers an opportunity to engage with the local community across age ranges and backgrounds. There has already been some interesting work by BBC Wales on participatory archive making, involving meeting working and skilling community participants. The project was called Capture Wales  where each digital story is made by the storyteller themselves.
The web link is : http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/audiovideo/sites/galleries/pages/capturewales.shtml

Some of the experiences and lessons learnt through this project could be of help in the Street project.
Their guide to digital storytelling has many useful elements that can inform approaches: http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/audiovideo/sites/about/pages/howto.shtml

Recorded History ….Maps, Population Data, Economic Activity, Types of Trade, Changes in economic Activity, Changes in Trade, Census Data,

Traces of previous lives and periods. Expert Interpretation

With recorded history there is a set of opportunities for displaying data and visualising layers of information online and also on new mobile devices. Mapping technologies with Google Maps and Google Earth allow us easily to add data layers and place markers with audio, video, text and image information embedded. This also extends on Google Earth to the placement of user generated 3D content.

Google Maps : http://earth.google.com/outreach/tutorial_mymaps.html
Google Earth : http://earth.google.com/userguide/v4/
SketchuP : http://earth.google.com/userguide/v4/ug_imageoverlays.html

The UCL Centre For Advanced Spatial Analysis have created their own free tools that work independently of Googles Api’s. It is worth taking sometime to look at the range of their mapping projects : http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/software/gmapcreator.asp

The Capable Project: http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/websites/capable.asp

Other examples of layering data over maps: http://blog.casa.ucl.ac.uk/?cat=8

All of the above mapping projects obviously apply to the development of a dynamic living memory archive as does the Capture Wales project.

Living Memory…….. People who lived in the area, people now living in the area. People who worked in the area people now working in the area. People who visited the area, cinema, theatre, groups, pubs, music, dancing.

Finding subjects to talk about and share their experiences of living, working or trading in the Street.

Mix of Genders, Ages, Groups.

Researchers finding subjects in the community recording them and their stories with a range of media, photographs, audio, moving image, text. Researchers establishing formats, skills, and technical structures that can be shared and passed on.

Dynamic Participatory Archive

Wikipedia has become an interesting example of user generated content that has formed a prolific community of contributors.

OpenStreetmap .org has quietly been doing the same in the creation of a world mapping resource. They have pioneered a self help community that go out using gps devices to map their local area and upload the gps data they have collected to fill in the details of their own area map. This then adds to the depth and detail of the data on the world map made available freely to all through the project. This provides interesting possibilities for a engaged community of archivists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap

Their technique for volunteer data collection are simple and easy to teach and share to involve others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap#Technique

Creating possibilities, skilling  people to contribute material about their experiences of the area. Across age ranges.
The ability and facility to upload photographs, text, video and audio, gps data complete with tagging and metadata capability. Utilising university knowledge, resources and teaching to bridge into and engage with the local community.

Sharing The Archive

Some of the UCL projects are good examples of visualising data over a topographical base:

The London Air Quality Map: http://www.londonair.org.uk/london/asp/virtualmaps.asp

The Map View: http://www.londonair.org.uk/london/asp/virtualmaps.asp?view=maps

Map Tube Various mapping projects: http://www.maptube.org/

Online based visualisation do not preclude paper based resources or ebooks of new materials placed in the archive from expert interpretation to self uploaded text, photographs, etc

The use of free tools and techniques and skills needed for participation could encourage a community of users from expert to newbie. In effect it could become an informal learning community supported by the university both in terms of pedagogy and resourcing.

It could become an online resource that develops into a community of shared experience, a learning community with growing skills that can be further enhanced and passed on.

Free tools and open source tools allow for the ease of sharing the resource without the barriers of proprietary software limiting the way data can be used and shared independent of platform.
Mapping of layers of data using new mapping technologies to represent the area with rich layers of data that can be explored to significant levels of detail.

Bridging the Virtual with the Real….Mobile Augmented Reality

Rather than the archive remaining at the participatory level in terms of a growing body of resources some of which is actively created by a community of users, there is a possibility of extending and bridging the virtual data collected into the real environment that people pass through.

Some exciting developments are currently taking place in the development of augmented browsers that allow the placement by gps of overlays of information upon the real world location. So with a mobile device you can be standing in a particular location which, with the aid of the inbuilt camera, will bring up relevant location information overlaid onto the physical position the user occupies.

Two current mobile augmented browsers have recently been developed:

Layar: http://layar.com/
Wickitude: http://www.wikitude.org/

Article on wickitude: http://www.gpsworld.com/consumer-oem/handheld/gps-based-augmented-reality-9022

A video of one of the browsers helps to explain how it bridges between the real and the virtual world:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/layar_could_be_the_future_of_augmented_reality.php

Examples using a mobile device with a camera to be able to view sema codes (barcodes) that then find and display information related to the read barcode. Or the barcode itself is a hyperlink that takes the mobile device to a web resource. Work has already been done by Cambridge University Press on their Romeo and Juliet GCSE text that includes sema codes at particular key critical points in the text. These sema codes can be read by a handheld playstation already loaded with audio and video content that is retrieved when the sema code is read by the devices camera.