Since I’ll be taking off tomorrow morning for another reality, I wanted to jot down some notes about the Monument City project my friend and I worked on the past six months. If you haven’t already checked it out, Monument City is a human-level geotagging project. It’s an experiment, for me, in embedding digital data in physical locations and then making that information accessible in a variety of media.
Like the name implies, Monument City chose as its focus the many historical monuments, markers and memorials around Baltimore City. Monuments are already a means of embedding human-readable data in geographic locations: information that is historically important, or things people thought were worth remembering for whatever reason. I also really like the fact that monuments are publicly accessible to everybody. Anybody can just walk up to a monument, read the plaque, feel the textures of the different materials or sit and contemplate in what amounts to basically a modern sacred space, a sanctuary amidst the bustle of the city.
Our basic method was quite simple: we rode our bikes all over town scouting out locations. A list of monuments in the city was compiled in 2000, but we found it to be both incomplete and out-of-date. So we supplemented that with other partial lists and first-person on-the-ground research to figure out where all these guys are hiding. Once on location, we took photos with an iPhone - which automatically embeds geodata and makes uploading to websites like Flickr a breeze. Flickr, in fact, became one component of our multi-pronged web strategy. Our Flickr feed is available here, but we quickly discovered that the cartographic elements of the Flickr application were severely limited. So my co-conspirator set up an account at Panoramio, a site dedicated to location-specific photos, owned by Google and which allows you to plug your location photos ultimately into Google Earth. Our Panoramio account is here.
While things were getting set up, we set up a temporary “research island” on Wordpress.com. Wordpress.com weblogs are a great tool for getting your information out there because the domain is ranked highly in Google, and the WP app is a wonderful thing which I’ve been using as my primary blogging platform for years. Eventually, we migrated our research feed to our own domain in order to collect ad revenue from it. So that means we have four active sites running, two of which are on domains we own, and two of which are on third-party photo websites.
What does this translate to in a practical sense - as far as search results, traffic and ranking are concerned? It means, first of all, that for every monument we have two photos embedded in the servers of competing companies: Google (Panoramio) and Yahoo (Flickr). It’s important to hedge your bets in a situation like this. Get your data out there, but make it high-quality and consistent. Search engines like nothing better than well-formed unique data sets. In addition to two photos stored on third-party web apps, we also have a main dedicated post for each monument which includes historical research, location notes, other monuments nearby and links for further study. While there were a few resources we tended to pull from again and again, I never found any other website doing exactly what we were doing on the data which we were focusing on. It helps TREMENDOUSLY to have a unique data niche that you’re fulfilling and again - high quality consistent data is *the way* to pull this off.
But right, so for each monument we have a main entry on our servers, plus two photos stored off-site, all of which we made an effort to link together not just with hyperlinks, but also with user account names, “monumentcity” and parallel language and data. That is, don’t just re-enter your data in a bunch of different websites. Make each account have a slightly different focus and content so that there is overlap, but not repetition. Repetition bores search engines. They don’t reward you for mindlessly plastering your data up across the entire web. Anyway, we’re using the research feed as a kind of free-form go-between amidst all these sites. The research feed is more like a proper blog, where we post clips of text from other websites, interesting historical photos and commentary. But most importantly, we link back and forth relentlessly to our other sites and user accounts. (This is a strategy I’ve used extensively on websites like Tumblr, where you can extract bits and pieces of data and reassemble them into feeds that link back and forth around particular sets of subject matter.)
In addition to photographing monuments, all the work of Bryson Dudley, we also did on-location audio recordings on cassette tape about the monument, the place & setting and the feeling of being in that spot. We have yet to incorporate that data into the website, but we plan to use it as the scratch-pad for full-featured audio walking and bicycle tours around the city by way of monuments. We’re looking at options for downloadable podcasts, as well as programming possibility for monument wayfinding applications on the iPhone. We’ve really only just scratched the surface with it all. We’ve also collected a few test video files of 360 degree walkarounds, because we’ve discovered that even Google Street view can’t capture complete, reliable or high-quality data for something like a monument. This is because the roof-camera-equipped cars Google sends out to capture street view information only travel in straight lines along the roadways. Monuments tend to be at peculiar junctures, or tucked away back from the road, or hidden from view by trees or bushes. We’d like to ultimately find a way to plug in high-quality human-scale digital video data to geographic locations that will surpass what’s currently available. Monuments seem like the natural place to start experimenting with that process and the technology surrounding it.
In the meantime, our results are - I think - fairly impressive. Above and beyond the high-quality data that we have painstakingly compiled regarding Baltimore’s multitudinous monuments, we’re also slaying search results for a lot of these locations. Depending on which monument you look up in Baltimore, we not only have our main website usually listed in the top 10 or top 5, but we have all of our supporting materials coming up as well. So that means, on certain monuments, we have anywhere from 4-6 of the top 10 search result slots. Which means that whatever doorway visitors access our data from, they are being consistently and reliably pulled into our interconnected web of information. An excellent start for six months of very interesting and engaging work completed with a good friend.
More to come though, as Monument City matures!
- END -
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4 Comments
Perhaps this could be of some value to you. Microsoft has programmed some very advanced and interesting features into this ware, such as being able to view your environment from a three-dimensional perspective.
Your project has inspired myself and a friend to begin a similar undertaking here in Atlanta, starting first with the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood. I am eager to see your project grow and flower.
It will be an interesting hunt for information given that much of the city’s history has been lost or destroyed, either intentionally or accidentally.
Thanks Sam, for some reason, I thought you lived in new york!
If only that were the case my friend. I’ll be making my way north in the near future. Think you’ll be finding your way south at some point?
I also find myself wondering about the potential for this project to be replicated in other cities around the world.
Yes, we’ve talked at length about taking Monument City on the road, contacting tourism bureaus, chambers of commerce, city art boards, etc. I think there is some significant potential for it.
Would definitely love to get down south at some point, but have never really had a landing pad built in anywhere for such a venture.