Assessment 3: Geo-Narrative
Assessment 3: Production Project
Geo-Narrative Rationale
For assessment 3 for the Networked Media Production Unit, I decided on the geo-narrative option as it complimented and expanded upon the body of work that I was already undertaking as part of my blog in assessment 2.
My blog was dedicated to my walking travels around Richmond with my two dogs, so I thought it would be perfect to be able to show some of these posts on a map for visitors to find for themselves.
Richmond, once a working class suburb is now quite a culturally diverse and interesting suburb, so I found there were a number of ways I could approach this project from a geo-narrative perspective. I considered a range of other options such as ‘Fit in Richmond’ highlighting all of the fun physical activities to do, or ‘Out and About in Richmond’ showcasing all of the popular café’s, pubs and restaurants. I even mocked them up on a map to test them out.
I also did quite a bit of searching through Tumblr to see if any other bloggers were documenting the area and to see what they were doing. I discovered that I was the only person exploring this subject, so in the end I wanted to show visitors a side to Richmond that they wouldn’t already know and share some of its hidden treasures.
As I had quite a lot of images collected, the list of possibilities to include on this map was quite long. As the brief limited the entries to 10-12 images, I decided to choose my 4 favourite images from each of the following headings:
1. Typography
Royston Hotel
Baby Pizza
Rowena Heights
Space
2. Street Art
Richmond Tiger
Botherambo Street
Number 8
Type
3. Richmond Icons
Dimmeys Clock
Nylex Clock
Skipping Girl Vinegar
St Ignatius Church
Once I’d made this decision, my next step was to mark out all of the features on a map with a pen and paper to see how it all flows. I then transferred these markers onto Google Maps using the ‘My Places’ feature.
I then spent quite a bit of time learning and discovering how to create custom markers for my map as I wanted the photograph of each location to be the visual marker. I created all of my markers in Photoshop, and that was where the fun began…
Technical difficulties
At first I encountered some rather difficult issues uploading my custom icons to the map. After much research and testing, I finally was able to resolve the issue using a combination of Google products: Google Picasa, Google Chrome and Google Maps. Picasa was used to host the custom markers online after creation and Chrome was used as the browser that would enable the upload.
Previously I had tried hosting the markers on a number of sites including my personal website, facebook, dropbox, flickr and eventually (and successfully) using Picasa. The in-text images weren’t a problem and were hosted on my personal web site.
If this failed, I had also research a back-up option that Google provides - a range of pre-designed markers. In the end I did not need to go down this path (http://code.google.com/p/google-maps-icons/wiki/CultureIcons )
Being able to select a topic that complimented my blog (assessment 2), I found that I was able to embrace a range of technologies to share my information ie. Google Maps, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.
The full version of the map is available online at: https://maps.google.com.au/maps/ms?msid=215440534782052593721.0004dcf64f47d5dca9a68&msa=0&ll=-37.821819,145.007558&spn=0.029052,0.066047