4 Geo-tagging and The Collective

Flickr's geo-tagging feature is fairly straight forward to use. It's drag-and-drop design allows a user to simply drag an image to the map and Flickr will automatically enter the associated coordinates.

This is fun, and interesting. After geo-tagging my own images from my "Saturday morning with D." I had a fine time telling our morning story with maps and well as images. When I did a quick search for fellow classmates' ASUweb20 tag, I found that my images did not show up even though I tagged them. I have been spinning my wheels for the better part of two hours trying to figure this out. Exhausted, I needed to destress, so I searched for what I now consider home, Mammoth Lakes. It seems that Mammoth's pro photogs have really availed themselves of the power of Flickr.

So there is is. A bit of ho-hum for you. Flickr geo-tagging is nice.

But wait! There's more. And it comes from...drum roll...Ted of course!

So geo-tagging is actually not just about marketing your photography services or creating your own little vanity pageant online. It is a way to tap into a collective knowledge base. A "metaverse" of information.

Of note,  is the demonstration of a 3-D rendering of the Notre Dame Cathedral using Photosynth. Basically, one can take a detailed, user navigated 3-D tour, in ridiculous detail. Developer Blaise Aguera y Arcas spoke it best when he said, the punch line behind the Photosynth technology... is [the] reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral was done entirely--computationally-- from images scraped from Flickr."

The implications for museums and the humanities is extraordinary. We digital humanists are increasingly able to aggregate and present ever greater amounts of data. We can know more for less and less money and resources. Think of it. How many grant dollars would it take to send a team to Notre Dame Cathedral to take pictures of every nook and cranny for a history or museum tour online?

Now we can just "scrape images from Flickr!?" Amaaaaazing!