Stowaway

Streets of Bournemouth

on 1 March 2011 at about 0:00

Streets of Bournemouth website completed

Now I've returned from paternity leave, I'm a bit late posting the website I've been working on over recent months, but here it is. Streets of Bournemouth has been funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, and produced in collaboration between Bournemouth University and Bournemouth Borough Council. Many volunteers spent countless hours scanning and annotating thousands of images covering 250 years of Bournemouth's history, and lots of people working at the university, the council, local libraries, museums and trusts have contributed to the project. Campbell Rowley designed and produced the website, and I designed and developed the website architecture and API, and implemented the mapping interfaces.

The site provides a powerful search tool to filter through about 10 thousand artefacts - image, video, audio and some educational PDFs written by Professor Vince May and Pat Summers who also project managed the entire enterprise. The vast majority of items are also geo-tagged, and so can be browsed using the map-based navigation tools. The map comparison section also allows you to view, side-by-side, old tithe and OS maps dating back as far as 1870. The site also has a social dimension, allowing any user to join and contribute new material of their own, comment on artefacts in the database, and start building a community.

A really fascinating project to work on - from the superhuman efforts of Pat to co-ordinate so many disparate contributors, to working with technologies like GeoServer and OpenSpace in a production environment, and the design challenge of making thousands of artefacts easily findable that the team at Campbell Rowley solved. I was particularly pleased with the API, designed to be extensible for future projects (hopefully we can start building mobile apps against the architecture already in place as part of the sustainability agenda for the site). A hat-tip, too, to Chris Boakes, alumnus of the BA Interactive Media Production at Bournemouth University, who I worked with closely in his role at Campbell Rowley producing the front-end templates, for a great job of implementing the team's rigorous designs.

Filed in: Programming, Web Portfolio