Geolocating Plaza Midwood

As many of you already know this blog began as a class project and as such many of its entries will be class assignments.  The course this blog will document is a graduate level course in digital history.  For the purposes of this particular class, my classmates and I have been separated into groups and we will be working on one major group project this semester.  Each group will be creating an online exhibition using Omeka. 

My group will be working on an online exhibition for the historic Plaza Midwood neighborhood of Charlotte, NC.  Plaza Midwood, like most areas of Charlotte, has seen a great deal of transformation over the last decade. Documenting the changing face and culture of Plaza Midwood from its development in the 1920s until now is going to be both challenging and rewarding.  

Omeka will allow us to utilize several ready-made plug-ins to create a user friendly website that will (hopefully) show the world Plaza Midwood's history and also its evolution from a streetcar suburb to a cultural hub.  One of the Omeka plug-ins I think will prove very useful is something called Geolocation.

Geolocation typically refers to the identification of the real world geographic location of something digital like your cell phone. Four Square is a really good example of this technology.  I'm not a big fan of this kind of geolocation because frankly I don't like people knowing where I am all the time.

Another kind of geolocation, though, is more broadly defined as digitally tracking the coordinates of a particular object.  This plug-in will allow my group to upload a historic image of, say, the old Harris Market in Plaza Midwood and then input its address on a google map so that the image would appear on the map where it used to be located.  We could then upload an image of what that exact location looks like now and users could visually interpret the transformation of the neighborhood overtime themselves.  As it currently seems that the theme of our online exhibition is going to be transformation/change over time, this plug-in will obviously be incredibly useful to us.  At least it will be if it works the way I think it will!  Of course technology always involves a bit of trial and error, so I'll let you know how well this plug-in works for the purposes I intend to use it for later.  Here's to hoping it won't require much trial and error on my part!

Obviously our online exhibition isn't ready yet (the semester just started), so in the mean time I'll leave you with a current screenshot of the google map of Plaza Midwood (click the image and it will get bigger so you can actually see it).