For 9 years daily, I have been curating photos of the day, seeking in more recent years what makes an outstanding image in a world of billions of photos.
SOS human chain around an oil drill in Ecuador posted in photo community I helped set up in 2007 for Al Gore's Live Earth, an event which had an audience of 2 billion.
Culturally...
For 3 years daily, I have been mapping notable photos of movie scenes, music history, and art history, threading them with other photos for locative context.
Bob Dylan is watching Dean Martin, Aug 1964. Dylan was house-sitting his manager Albert Grossman's Woodstock home (18 Striebel Rd, Bearsville, NY). Photo by Douglas Gilbert.
Bringing It All Back Home (1965) cover with Bob Dylan was photographed in 1964 by Daniel Kramer at Albert Grossman's Woodtock home. Sally Grossman is pictured with items time-stamping that year.
For 1.5 years daily, I started mapping biographies of notable people, where they made history, where they lived, and where they went to school. For some who made history, I mapped scenes of books they wrote. Quotes of the day were mapped in literary history.
It became fascinating to check-in people who never had an online profile. You could check-in a dead person at an extinct place to immortalize a story.
After visiting Woody Guthrie at Greystone Hospital (59 Koch Ave Morris Plains, NJ), Bob Dylan went to Woody's home at 3520 Mermaid Ave (Coney Island, NY) in January, 1961, to look for songs Woody said Dylan could have. Arlo Guthrie answered the door. No one could find the songs. The house is gone now. Woody lived here 1943-50 before being hospitalized. The songs were later found by Nora Guthrie and recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco on the album Mermaid Avenue (1998).
Historically (before social media)....
I started to map photos and stories from my dark room journalism days and pre-social media days. Historical items and cultural artifacts were being geo-tagged for the first time.
Gwyneth Paltrow with Owen Wilson at 3rd Ave and 128th St (East Harlem) in The Royal Tennenbaums (2001)
Then and Now...
Geographical intersections with future imagery became profoundly interesting.
Deeper hidden history made wordless photos relevant. Things we never knew were nearby started to emerge on a regular basis geo-tagged at the same place or vicinity.
I could see a Movieview of a street for a new perspective. Or where Patti Smith lived, where Steve Jobs went and where songs or paintings were composed near a photo I posted. Historical elements local to a photo enriched the viewing experience.
Little Italy in Godfather (1974) was on E 6th St (between Ave A and Ave B) in New York City. The building with an arched entrance in front of Robert De Niro's head is 524 E 6th St.
March 10, 1974, photo by Allan Tannenbaum on set of Godfather (1974) at 524 E 6th St. See the circle on the sign in Allan's photo and see it again in the photo with De Niro.
Photo sharing became enhanced with rich stories and alternate visual perspectives.
Personal Connectivity....
The most popular photos, I observed, were typically not the most beautiful photos or most artistic but rather photos that had the greatest personal connections. Viewers had been to those places, knew those people or identified with the story. And stories related to those photos illuminated those personal connections. It was time or place viewers knew. Time and place defined taste and vice versa for a scene.
Fab Five Freddy aka Fred Brathwaite was also featured in Blondie's video for Rapture:
Intelligent story connections...
A locative database I grew by hand curation became increasingly powerful connecting stories in a way never seen before at this depth and breadth. It could do for stories what Pandora did for music, correlating stories.
The database became smarter at connecting narratives through cumulative curation. The more notable stories were tagged at places with photos (accurately), the more powerful a streetview of a neighborhood became. Locative intelligence of future layers of stories became only possible with knowledge of prior geographical layers.
The quality of locative intelligence, visual imagery and narratives drove the capabilities of this locative media engine.
The only other search engine I have seen this engaging is Google.
Exclusive location IDs from geo-sleuthing...
A record 20,000 hours was spent charting where notable art, invention and history got made. 1.6 million pieces were geo-tagged into 160,000 posts, covering the most relevant spots in the world.
A fair amount of geo-sleuthing was conducted to uncover mysterious locations of notable imagery and stories. Stanley Kubrick's first film was geo-tagged for the first time. As were other notable endeavors.
Meaningless photos offering geographical clues - a streetview of that time - became relevant to help identify locations nearby where history was made. Live community posts helped solve location mysteries or correct mistaken locations in comment threads.
Points of Interest Illuminating Trails of Trailblazers....
Stories that put places on the map were put on the map. The roots of history makers visually illuminated future trails they blazed. The first extensive map of JD Salinger's life was created.
Last home of Catcher In The Rye author JD Salinger
(GPS 43.511931, -72.346789)
Locative patterns were gleaned for the first time mapping where trailblazers made history. "Geo-patterns" emerged.
400+ homes of Greenwich Village writers. Greenwich Village has had the highest concentration of Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners in the world as well as people on the cover of Time.
This is an emerging field called locative media. A new way to exhibit media and art by location as points of interest. Stories paint the topography of a neighborhood and time in history. Ghosts visualize a neighborhood.
Content gardening for a geo-tagged feed...
For coverage, Google, Apple, Facebook, Instagram and other geo-players are challenged with finding compelling content to create something astounding by location. But user-generated content has a track record of being more social in nature and very brief. Posting by phone is limited by time and scope.
The difference is between showing this scene from The Godfather was shot where you are and Ernest Hemingway wrote this inspiring quote here versus just saying Jill met Jack here and enjoyed the food. Convenient user-generation produces lightweight insta-results. A community of curators produces heavyweight results.
Content gardening is critical for a decent viewing experience in locative media. The feed has to look very distinguished from social media. The question is how can a highly intelligent locative database produce something beyond Instagram and Conde Nast for viewing, publishing and conversation pleasure.
Cafe Terrace (9-11 Place du Forum. Arles, France) as an Instagram for good coffee...or as an 1888 painting by Vincent Van Gogh.
Designing a new locative medium...
It became obvious you cannot design a great new locative medium without the ideal content already populated. So that had to happen first. One needed to have a better idea of how locative content behaved and what the topics were. Enough relevant stories and visuals needed to be indexed first.
Otherwise, it is not so obvious how to architect and focus a compelling locative viewing experience. And that is just for viewing. Compelling community engagement and publishing have their own behavior.
GPS and maps seemed like natural tools for locative viewing. Stories and photos become viewable by GPS, browseable on map and searchable by address.
But a map was never intended to be a browser for media. It is too slow to scroll regularly by the hour, minute or second. People use them mostly only when lost. Maps also present stories as obscure pins (sometimes nicknamed "chicken pox"). That's something a web page or newspaper would never do in information architecture by design.
Pins on a map show no stories up front. Compelling content is not presented. What is there is unknown at first glance.
You even need to zoom in to see that more pins exist. Each pin can only represent one story per place even for a place with 100s of stories. Invisible pins and stories are due to slow page loading. Maps are too slow to load already with just visible pins.
I needed to think of new ideas for how to view locative imagery faster at a much higher volume level daily.
Maps also could not facilitate community engagement readily. That posed yet another challenge. Maps lacked "stickiness."
GPS (also slow to load) can only show stories nearby, which is usually home, work or at a personal hangout. The experience is myopic and often stagnant if no new stories are added nearby. You can be stuck seeing the same old stories nearby all the time without exploring new stories.
Featured daily/hourly new stories from anywhere in the world worked better than GPS for content refreshment. Cultural affinity and personal connections are still key for stickiness but are not dependent on being nearby.
While on the go, there is also very little time to use GPS unless you are lost. While travelling abroad, you might not have a data plan for GPS. GPS also consumes battery power fast.
I concluded GPS and maps (as they are today) would only be used as reference tools when needed, but not as a habit.
The addictive habit found....
A Facebook group featuring notable photos in Manhattan by location showed me something addictive. Threading related photos and stories daily in comments created a wider view of a scene.
Locative experiences I soon realized are less about pins on a map and more about creating a "scene." What I call, "scening it." It's about augmenting a post with more interesting stories or photos at a place, creating enriching conversations.
Great commenting (addictive to read)....
Comments in a cool locative community differ a lot from the "all about me" traits of social media and are more about "here's an interesting story you might not know."
People who were/are part of a scene engage in a conversation regularly in this group. They add their exclusive stories and photos of that scene, and their unique takes on it.
Creative and social history gets further documented to augment a scene. I learn something everyday and in almost every post. The photos are also killer to start off, to incite conversation.
Anatomy of a habitual community...
Here's how a regular viewing habit was formed at this locative photo group for Manhattan on Facebook:
1. FEATURED FEED - A featured feed (with a variety of curators) shows new scenes (photo, photo credit, people in it, location, date and story). I don't have to go look for a "scene." Cool new scenes get pushed to me by the hour.
2. LIKE - People "like" the scene to push the scene up in the feed.
3. ADD STORIES - People add personal histories or observations of the scene in comments to move the scene up in the feed. This separates it from a traditional "photo dump" site, as one administrator noted. The photo draws people to the scene. The personal stories make the scene.
4. ADD PHOTOS - People also add interesting photos related to that scene, including movie scenes there. Photos can show how a scene changed (then and now). This augments the scene visually.
5. NOTIFICATIONS - You are notified if someone liked a post you liked or added something interesting.
6. LOCATION ID - If a location is mysterious, others help to identify the scene's location. Locative clues are highlighted to help everyone search. Viewers found it fun and obsessive to look for a mysterious place in a city they knew.
7. SHARE - The scene is shared to a personal Facebook page. More people join the community as a result. The scenes are also blogged about because of their cultural interest. New York Magazine called this locative community "high brow" and "brilliant."
8. SEARCH - A search engine is available to find scenes by name or place.
Accelerating scene augmentation....
With an intelligent locative database, cool photos and stories can be connected to a scene powerfully fast. You can also follow people of your taste tagged to other scenes to see other points of interest rapidly.
You can branch off and explore fast.
Creating new scenes (curated addresses)...
Posting a new scene not already in the feed has been the hardest task to date when geo-tagging photos. After determining the scene/image is unique, you have to figure out who took the photo and where it took place. This is usually done at home on a desktop. The best you can typically do by phone is post a photo of what a place looks like now - or just view a feed (like and comment).
The locative database I have been curating doesn't use a pre-ordained venue database offered by Google, Mapbox or Foursquare. I had to manually look for and type each new address (or lat/long) into the database. But the benefit is that many notable addresses (homes, landscapes and new lat/long sites) are not in 3rd party venue databases already. Only this database now has these addresses compiled.
These are premium addresses because history was made there. The addresses themselves are curated. There were even astrological connections on birthdays and at birthplaces featured daily.
There is no 3rd party charging for traffic for an off-the-shelf venue database who can also pull the plug if you don't pay enough.
A style guide was also needed to differentiate locations (and sometimes people) with the same names. There can be common names like Chinatown, Little Italy, City Hall, Main Street, 1st Street or Starbucks in every major city.
Sometimes it is hard to know if a photo has been posted before at places with so many stories. There was no duplicate image detection other than personal memory of the feed.
Filtering views (ranking by topic)...
On average, history was made twice at a location that made history. But there were also event venues like Madison Square Garden with 100s of stories needing to be ranked for viewing.
Six topics emerged for presentation:
1) Movie scenes
2) Music history
3) Photos of the Day
4) History & Biographies
5) Literature & Books (Quotes & Scenes)
6) Art & Invention
Reminded me of Trivia Pursuit ...
Weekly since 2007, I have also been documenting music communities in Toronto and New York (as well as cross-country tours) - music history as it unfolds. I have snapped 100,000+ photos following the lives of several hundred Artists over 8 years who have each grown social media communities. It showed a geo-pattern for where music history got made today.
Map of events chronicled for one singer in one city over 8 years.
Photo Radius...
Notable stories and photos local to a new photo posted gave macro-context. Something you cannot find in a typical social media photo feed. Any place, person, photo or story becomes enriched by nearby history.
Hidden stories get connected. People, art and places get connected in new ways.
In a prior post, I also noted a way to explore based on mutual interests to discover even more hidden stories driven by personal connections.
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