I like to play with open data, cultural heritage content, and APIs, mainly focussing on front end user experience and topics like crowdsourcing.
Here are a few examples. Most are still in the hack/prototype stage.
- On This Day – explore images from specific days in history. Content currently includes Europeana, Flickr Commons, Imperial War Museum (including the Bond of Sacifice Collection, portraits of soldiers who died in WW1), the American Air Museum, and the UK’s National Maritime museum.
- Europeana Colour Explorer – uses Europeana’s new media metadata to deliver an engaging discovery tool based on colour
- PostcodePast – a prototype tool for geo-discovery and crowdsourcing of your local cultural heritage, worldwide. Uses APIs from Wikipedia, Europeana, Flickr (Flickr Commons images only) and DPLA. Finds non-geotagged, location specific content.
- CulturePics – custom images from cultural collections
- GathrIt (currently offline) – a concept and demo for a crowdsourcing toolset for cultural collections. It provides a user-focussed on-page toolset for geotagging, dating, text tagging and commenting. It also allows cross-collection search and intuitive suggestions of potentially related items, and user-curation. It was built as a rapid-prototype using WordPress and utilises APIs such as Google Maps, Flickr and the OpenCalais natural language processing service. The aim would be to release the generated content via an API and, potentially, as Linked Open Data.
- Flickr Commons Tagr – tools for crowdsourcing tags, dates and locations of Flickr Commons images
- Flickr Cropr – take any Flickr image and crop a detail from it
- Flickr ‘Rule of Thirds’ – a simple demonstration of one of the prinicipal rules of photography, applied to any Flickr image
- London Cycle Stats – visualisation using open data from the London Cycle Scheme (aka Boris Bikes)
- A Penny Per Mile – in 2013 I set out to cycle 5,000 miles with the aim of raising £5,000 for Prostate Cancer UK. I built a platform that allowed sponsors to make pledges based on mileage, and integrated it with the JustGiving API to automate payments. I achieved both targets!
Older projects
- Flickr Commons Timeline
- Flickr Commons Map
- PhotosOfThePast – my first site, set up in 2007 to crowdsource vintage photographs. Built with Drupal. Now deprecated as social media platforms that barely existed back then do a better job!