By joe.murray on

Some colleagues have a simple app they need developed that's little more than putting some cck data on a Google Map. It will be installed on their clients' sites. Please respond to them directly at greg (at) mappingauthentcity (dot) com.

Mapping Community Stories and Identity

Summary

An alliance of consulting firms working in the area of cultural mapping and cultural planning wish to develop a web-based tool to support community identity mapping and storytelling. The tool would support individuals in telling important stories about their community in multiple formats (text, video, audio) and connect those stories to Google Maps.

Background

About Cultural Mapping

Cultural mapping is a systematic approach to identifying and recording on cultural assets or resources in communities. It has two dimensions:

1. Resource Mapping – identifying and recording physical (or tangible) cultural resources making use of GIS tools and platforms;
2. Community Identity Mapping – exploring ‘intangible cultural resources’ – the stories – past, present, future - that define a community’s identity and sense of place.

1. Resource Mapping

AuthentiCity (http://mappingauthenticity.com) in collaboration with The Breken Group has developed a cultural mapping system to support resource mapping that consolidates baseline data from multiple sources – Statistics Canada, local Yellow Pages, data on cultural heritage assets held by Planning Departments – within a coherent Cultural Resource Framework. The mapping system feeds municipal GIS enabling the data to be mapped by Planning Departments and/or Economic Development Departments or agencies. The tool also feeds Googlemaps.

The mapping system then puts in place a locally administered wiki-based mapping tool to enable individuals and organizations in the community to continuously update and extend baseline mapping data. Other features include wiki-based community calendars.

Establishing local mapping systems must be integrated with community engagement strategies; the currency and accuracy of data in the local system is only as good as people’s awareness and participation in the ongoing process.

2. Community Identity Mapping

To complement the asset mapping tool, AuthentiCity and a third firm Trajectory wish to develop a ‘toolset’ to support community identity mapping. A community engagement process using a framework of questions designed to elicit community stories will support use of the tool. What is currently desired is a content management system (such as Drupal) configured to manage a diversity of types of content and connect that to Google Maps in an easy-to-use interface. Wherever possible we encourage firms to optimize existing, open source tools.