The big idea

NYC: LES graffiti2
by Professor Bop

Welcome to our blog, which will cover the Lewis & Clark College Graffiti Project from its beginning to public launch. We're hopeful that the project could serve as a model for creating a collaborative digital image project with mobile devices and Flickr.

"We" are Margo Ballantyne, former Visual Resources Curator, and me (Jeremy McWilliams), Digital Services Coordinator from L&C's Watzek Library in Portland, OR. Our team will also include Lewis & Clark students on the New York trip, and possibly other collaborators as the project evolves. We have some experience with Flickr-based image collections, namely accessCeramics.

Margo and I met for the first time yesterday to formally discuss the project. Here are some of the main concepts:

• Students on the NYC trip will be assigned to neighborhoods, and will take pictures of street art and graffiti using digital cameras or mobile devices (smart phones, etc.).
• Students will upload images to their individual Flickr accounts, and will add geo coordinates using Flickr's "map my image" feature (or with EXIF data for certain mobile devices).
• Students will catalog their images using a to-be-developed schema on catalogr.net (a project I'm occasionally working on for cataloging Flickr images with machine tags).
• We'll create a lightweight web site (HTML/CSS/jQuery/Flickr API) to organize the images by neighborhood (using Flickr's Places) and possibly other metadata queries (here's a very rough "proof of concept" page that uses Flickr's API to pull current images tagged with "graffiti" and mapped in NYC neighborhoods).
• Depending upon how things go, we may open contribution up to the general public after the NYC trip has concluded.

Based upon our meeting, here's our initial to-do list:

• Margo will develop a criteria list for students regarding quality of images and taking notes in the field (recording location, style, and other information).
• Margo will create a metadata schema that the students will later use for cataloging their Flickr images
• Students participating in the NYC program will get Flickr accounts, and practice uploading and mapping images.
• I'll start on a document for software development.
• When the metadata schema is complete, I'll apply the schema to catalogr.net for later use.
• I'll create a video tutorial for the students showing how to map images on Flickr and catalog images on catalogr.net.

Margo and her students leave for New York on August 30th, so we have about six weeks to get things going. We're both very excited about the project, and hope the students will approach it with similar enthusiasm.