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CH2 Community Mapping

Gabriel Bodard edited this page Jan 28, 2021 · 15 revisions

Sunoikisis Digital Cultural Heritage, Spring 2021

Session 2. Community Mapping

Thursday Jan 28, 16:00 UK = 17:00 CET

Convenors: James Morley (A Street Near You), Valeria Vitale (British Library)

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/D3iToLMlNy8

Slides: combined slides (PDF)

Session outline

In this seminar we will introduce the role that place information plays in cultural heritage, both as a means of engagement for the audience and as an aggregator of heterogeneous resources for cultural institutions. We will look, in particular, at how place is strongly connected with memory and identity, and how this bond can be used to make citizens feel like stakeholders in their own cultural heritage. We will discuss the concepts of citizen science and community mapping, looking at examples from Historic England, Layers of London, and GB1900. We will focus on a case study: the map-based web application A Street Near You developed by James Morley and combining open data relating to the First World War from multiple sources. Finally, in the exercise, we will invite students to create a new thematic "layer" in the Layers of London platform.

Seminar readings

For discussion in this thread

Further Reading

Other resources

Exercise

  1. Create a new layer in the Layers of London platform Create a free account on Layers of London. Familiarise with the project exploring its layers (historical maps and datasets) and the various collections (documents associated to a particular point on a map). Then, create a new layer following the instructions at https://www.layersoflondon.org/help-centre. You can, for example, create a layer that highlights places in London that are related to the classical period, or those that show Egyptian influences in the architecture. Ideally, you should link a document (for example, a photograph), but, for the purpose of this exercise, you can simply write some text explaining why you added that particular spot to your collection. Feel free to add links to external resources, like Wikipedia pages. This exercise can be performed a single-person task, or as a small group one.

(If you have any technical problems with this exercise, you may ask for help in this forum thread)