Flickr Places

Flickr is really great for a number of reasons. It's free, or really cheap if your collection exceeds 200 photos. It has social networking, including tagging, commenting, groups, etc. And Flickr provides an extremely well documented Application Programming Interface (API) so developers can create sites using images and data stored on Flickr servers.

But the gem that can make our project work is Flickr's Places. Places basically takes a geotagged image, and associates it with different hierarchical levels of geography (country/region or state/city/neighborhood). This lets you essentially "visit" different places in the world, at least through the eyes of images on Flickr (like Portland, for example).

Much of this is built upon Yahoo's GeoPlanet architecture, which includes identifiers called Where On Earth IDs (WOEID). Every place, whether it is a city, country, neighborhood, etc., has a WOEID. Flickr has a nice interface for learning more about a place (like Portland), and everything associated with its WOEID.

Fortunately for us, Flickr also provides some great API functions for querying information and images using a WOEID as a limiting criteria. Here are two such functions that we'll use in our project:

• flickr.places.placesForTags: returns a list of places (and their corresponding WOEIDs) that are "children" of a WOEID you provide. For example, if you provide the WOEID for Portland, the resulting set will be neighborhoods of Portland, since neighborhoods are "children" of a city. To take this further, you can specify that any places returned must have geotagged images that contain a certain Flickr tag. So if you were interested in getting a list of Portland neighborhoods that had images tagged with "art", you could do so.

• flickr.photos.search: this is probably the most basic Flickr API function - you provide some search criteria, and get back a set images (or data to create the image paths with a scripting language). For example, we could get a set of images tagged with "art" for the Mississippi neighborhood of Portland.

So on a very basic level, here's how the forthcoming website for our project will work:

1. We'll use flickr.places.placesForTags to get a list of New York City neighborhoods that has images our students have tagged. In all likelihood, we'll use Flickr machine tags in order to make our query precise. The response will be displayed to the user as a list of "clickable" neighborhoods.
2. When the user clicks on a neighborhood, the site will use flickr.photos.search to return images in that neighborhood tagged by our students.

Again, that's the very basic functioning. We'll also allow users view images based on metadata values the students enter for images, and ideally will let users view neighborhood street art images over time. Once we have our specific plans in place, I'll post how we'll accomplish these goals.

But from a developer standpoint, there really won't be too much work. Flickr's "Places" has already done the heavy lifting by providing the architecture and the API methods. All we have to do is get the images in Flickr, map and tag them, and write some code to query and re-purpose the API responses. Obviously Margo and her students have a tall task to actually do the field work. But if done correctly, we should have a well-functioning site almost entirely driven by Flickr.

(image above Cardboard Guitar by opalmirror)

Where the idea came from . . . .

An experiment to develop and employ mobile technologies for teaching and learning (or. . . . how I fell in love with my iPhone and started to think of the many creative ways I could use it to teach in New York City.)

It's great to be working with Jeremy again on a new project. I retired from the Visual Resources Curator position in Sept. 2009 (and my involvement with accessCeramics ) and just as quickly signed on as Program Leader for the Lewis & Clark College, New York City Off-Campus Program, Fall 2010. "The Contemporary Art of New York City" is the course I will teach in the fall, and having led the NYC program in 2003, I am familiar with all the graffiti art and street art that fills the city. This type of art is certainly contemporary, it is controversial, and a wonderful contrast to the precious and priceless artworks the students will be viewing in the galleries, museums and public venues in the city. It is also art work that lends itself to digital capture, it is often ephemeral, it can be neighborhood based and site-specific, and therefore a great candidate for geo-tagging. I have a lot more study and contemplation to do before I develop the criteria for image gathering and for what I want the final outcome of the project to be. There already exist websites that track the history and neighborhoods of the graffiti of New York City, but they don't involve geo-tagging. Attending the 2010, NITLE Camp (Mobile Track) at DePauw University in July was a big help in exposing me to case studies of wireless pedagogy in the liberal arts. I have a lot to think about.

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.