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"Locating" the Mississippi Blues in 3 Platforms

Knight 2007 News Challenge Winner

bluestrail.jpg

lat 33.4043
long -90.3055

Mississippi Blues Trail Tour in Google Earth
(download Google Earth for free, then launch the kmz file)

ScreenCast of Mississippi Blues Google Earth Geo-Tagged Project
(a screencast is a video capture of what happens on the computer monitor.)

Friday night arrived, our round-the-clock week's worth of work was done and it was finally time to present to all the participants and guest of the National Black Programming Consortium's New Media Institute. Prominent leaders in the Public Broadcasting world and NGO filmmaking community had participated in panels all week: Notables from PBS, CPB, NPR, PRX, ITVS, BAVC, POV, AFI were all there. In addition, many of our gracious hosts were also in attendance: Folks from Mississippi Pubic Broadcasting, B.B. King Museum, Mississippi Blues Trail, Jackson State University, and the Mississippi Film Office.

Unfortunately, due to a series of events, our team was unable to present our work in any meaningful way. So, here on this blog, I'll be presenting the projects for the first time. They will all be housed on the NBPC's website as well as on the Center for Locative Media's website. We'll start the discussion around integrating our work into Mississippi Blues Commission's future work so that the community can experience the Blues in the alluvian plain that we know as the Mississippi Delta.

A quick recap of our locative media project: A multi-platform geo-tagging of three of the Markers on the Mississippi Blues Trail: Hickory Street in Canton; WGRM Radio Station in Greenwood; and, the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale. This new media project spanned 3 platforms (online, cellphone, gps-enabled PDA), 7 file types, at least 20 different kinds of mobile gear.

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2 comments so far, Add Yours

 

this sounds like it is going great. Any chance you can document a piece of it on a short YouTube or other video segment so folks can go beyond the screen cast?

 

Which platforms / tools did you use for geotagging the content? How can we access it?

Full disclosure: I'm working on a social discovery platform which combines user generated and editorial geotagged content, search and social features which can be accessed from multiple devices, so you might say I have a professional curiosity.

We used to allow users to geotag audio at Socialight in our previous revision using Asterisk and a phone call, but this wasn't as popular as we hoped, so we've removed it for the moment.

Right now, when users geotag content on Socialight - it is added as Sticky Notes which are then instantly accessible on multiple platforms (online / mobile / GPS-enabled devices / anything that can view web pages) as well as through a variety of feed options (GeoRSS & KML).

Check out the Bio Tracking Project where Anna Dumitriu maps the locations where she found audio and samples of bacteria. Fun stuff.

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