When we collected roles like ‘wife of Nelson Mandela’ I realised that there could be a special type of role that connects two people. Because of our data model, it wasn’t very difficult to add a ‘related person’ to the person-role table which is used for special ‘relationship’ roles. Thus we now have the role ‘wife’ which we can say ‘of Nelson Mandela’.

As the number of relations between people mentioned on plaques has grown (especially royalty) I have been working on presenting a more family tree-like view. This is fairly basic at the moment, as I plan to get the information displayed before making it beautiful.

Special ‘relationship’ roles are currently family based: father, mother, son, daughter, husband, wife.

We have also started with ‘band member’.

Photographs on Open Plaques can be classified by ‘shot’, e.g. a close-up or an establishing shot. We then display the closest shot as the primary image (as an aside, there was a discussion over whether to have the closest or the furthest away. The close-up won as the viewer can read the words.). This was not at all obvious to the normal user as it was a feature hidden away for admins.

I have loosened the security and updated the UI to allow anyone to edit the shot classification. It is under the ‘Your photo. How to edit it’ link.

The design of the Open Plaques interface is a constant balance of hiding away the complexities from the visiting public and exposing functionality for the more involved user. Our general practise is to trial features for admin users first, then move them into general use afterwards. We didn’t really want to have different classes of edit permissions, but for the purposes of keeping it simple it has been the quickest way.

The other alternative is that more detailed controls are hidden under sub-pages. I think that ultimately this is the way it will/should go.

Finally, there is always the spectre of spam. Some fields are deliberately only editable by admin users, as we have to avoid being taken over by spammers.

Admins are able to edit roles to set an abbreviation and a role type to make a role ‘special’.

I have updated some roles to be more specific so that we don’t bias the site towards one particular country, e.g. “Prime Minister” is now “Prime Minister of the United Kingdom”.

Personal-Roles can have dates set on them and I plan to display these on the role pages, so, continuing the example above, we will soon be able to generate a list of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom and the dates when they served.

Today’s change was quite small, but just an example of how the site is being constantly worked on.

More fundamentally than that, some dispute the very notion of celebrating influential people in the first place – the cornerstone criteria that most plaque schemes hinge on – and challenge the interpretations of history by means of which figures from the past are portrayed and elevated.

Art initiatives around plaques frequently seem in-step with this iconoclastic ethos; taking the plaques back for the people as it were. I’ve written about two such projects before, and now here’s a third one! Each has its own unique twist on reclaiming plaques for everyday public life. But this is the first one that’s really about time-travelling.

In two incarnations in 2011 and 2012, artist Danny Coope mined the history of lives lived in north London by playing with the opportunities yielded by what’s fashionably known as ‘big data’. How? First, he homed in on a street – Grosvenor Park Road in Walthamstow for the E17 Festival Art Trail in September 2011, and Fore Street in Edmonton for the Make Yourself at Home project that ran April-May 2012. Then he combed through and re-used data from 1911 and earlier censuses (available online) for place-based factual storytelling through the temporary installation of plaques.

Coope cast an artist’s curatorial eye on archival sources and twigged that mass availability of the occupations of residents and their dates of residence corresponded neatly with what we’re used to seeing on UK blue plaques. Placed on the relevant buildings, some changed much in style and function in the intervening century and some erased completely, these missives re-animated the past. So far, so familiar…

What sets these particular plaques apart and lifts them out of the ordinary is the impact of time itself on what we read into the minutiae. While some of the jobs are still common, if not at least still abiding in nooks and crannies of the working world – I reckon there’s still a few tea tasters and stenographers walking among us – many are unfamiliar enough to raise eyebrows and set us wondering about what that person’s life was like back then.

This is an era of ‘farriers’, ‘pewterers’, ‘whip socket makers’ and even an ‘ostrich feather curler’; alongside which we find a ‘Briarwood pipe maker’, an ‘ivory turner’, a ‘mangler’ and the improbably sci-fi comic book sounding ‘Xylonite factory boy‘ (which led me to discover the Hale End British Xylonite Company, a moreish slice of industrial history).

The occasional ‘significant’ role you’d find on traditional plaques does pop up – Frederick Bremer, builder of Britain’s first motor car, lived in Grovesnor Park Road for instance and has a Wikipedia entry. But largely it’s the bygone occupations, curios, and the huge variety that make the series so intriguing. It’s cosmopolitan London undoubtedly, but not as we know it.

More scientific data analysis (aka “distant reading“) of these two boroughs’ surnames from a cultural or historical point of view could tell us things we might not know (as Ted Underwood explains), but Coope’s MO is resolutely microscopic and subjective. He doesn’t deal in grand narratives or empirically grounded patterns. The results are quite transporting.

It’s worth remembering that Coope’s creative premise would be stillborn if it weren’t for the standard criteria of the long-running plaque schemes. There’d be nothing to debunk, zilch to compare it with. You can’t have a revolution if there’s nothing to revolt against.

Equally, while we may put faith in discovery of previously unknown pattens, clusters and connections drawn from digitally enabled macro analysis, projects such as Coope’s prove there’s endless mileage to artistic license. Non-standardised approaches to finding meaning in datasets can still bring the past to life in new ways too. One approach doesn’t negate or supplant the other.

Just as many of the vinyl plaques to early film industry entrepreneurs in the shop windows of ‘Flicker Alley‘ in central London have lingered on more than two years after the festival they were put up for, so most of the 2011 plaques are still in place on Grovesnor Park Rd. Present day locals have adopted their residential ancestors and let them stay a while longer than fleeting. It will be great to see more technology-led projects with the same impact. It’s so much easier for people to relate to other people than to bond with macro insights.

But it’s still worth asking if Coope’s creative filtering of the archives, and locating of data ‘in the wild’ is evidence of broader trends. Every time census data is released there’s a huge flurry of excitement and activity amongst historians, archivists and of course genealogists; some stories hit the news headlines, and endless footprints are left in subsequent journals and books. Do modern digitised records make the impact of such public data greater – is there any real democratisation or marked shifts happening?

My knowledge is equally anecdotal… so what do you reckon? The Open Plaques project is all about public input. How do you think we should remember and celebrate the everyday? What other great sources of local history remain untapped, and un-digitised for that matter? What’s your take on reclaiming plaques and places for the people and surfacing some stories while you’re at it?

After all, as Coope’s work shows, not only the “great and good” are interesting. It also proves data is a powerful resource, especially in creative contexts and in public spaces. To give data about the past its due – what else should we be doing with it?

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IMAGE CREDITS: The photographs of Ernest Hind and Carl Faust’s plaques are copyright of Danny Coope 2011. The photograph of Henry Pearce’s plaque was taken in 2012 by Danny Coope and is Creative Commons 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) licensed.

The full set of each of Danny Coope’s Flickr photograhps of his plaque projects can be found at the following places for Walthamstow (2011) and Edmonton (2012). The E17 Art Trail festival is on again this year, 1st – 16th September.

Shrugging off the mantle of news bulletins and potted biographies from the past, an art project staged in 2008 cast a series of plaques spread over three streets as a loosely joined public platform for sharing present-day thoughts, located beyond normal consultative channels and boundaries.

Peer Plaques, in the town of Burnley, Lancashire, featured a selection of quotes from residents in response to the question:  “What is your first thought when you think about your neighbourhood?”

The blue markers, in this context, worked like a material analogue to what technologist and author David Weinberger described (in his 2002 book Small Pieces Loosely Joined), as the distributed web of hyperlinked documents that upended the top-down and one-way media paradigm which had dominated the pre-web era.

One of three artworks commissioned by Burnley Borough Council under the Burnley Public Art Project, Peer Plaques was the outcome of a two-year residency in which an artist-architect team made up of media artist Kevin Carter and civic Architects facilitated discussion with locals about the present and future effects of regeneration – specifically Housing Market Renewal (HMR) in Burnley. Various concepts were evolved by the team from this process, but as economic issues bore down on the overall project,  Peer Plaques became the focal point for the project to deliver.

A reversal on the (albeit not universally adhered to) norm of plaques focusing ‘objectively’ on ‘notable’ folks of yore and deeds of ‘historic’ import; the project foregrounded ordinary people’s views, sharing their opinions about their area and some stories about how they got there. The inscriptions were uncompromisingly subjective, spoken from direct experience.

The final outcome saw plaques installed on the very same boarded-up houses in three of Burnley’s terraced housing regeneration areas that had been targeted for regeneration but had yet to be demolished.

Forming a visible counterpoint to the media gauze of shiny, redevelopment happy-speak, these location-based bulletins were shooting from the hip. At street level, officially sanctioned history and PR airbrushing were nowhere to be seen…

Not only was the strategy and progress-based language that framed official communications in press releases and the local media notably absent, an eerie quality also pervaded the plaques and their contents when seen in situ. They were at once unconventional and familiar, transmitting messages immediate and ghostly.

In unison they were a pointed reminder that culture and history are made up of multiple contested viewpoints; how could you possibly harmonise them into one anodyne and uncomplicated narrative? In turn the quotes are evidence that history started not only within living memory but a second ago.

While the answers themselves range from strident local pride and unexpected reveries to complaints and demands, another interesting detail is that the myriad perspectives voiced through the plaques also root and convey themselves in different time contexts: retrospective, present, and future-tense. They encompass an ambiguous mention of the local skate park, an upbeat anecdote of a move over from Northern Ireland, and even ambivalence about having an opinion at all.

In terms of the sum meaning, the comments can’t be separated from the physical backdrop – the speakers no longer occupy the spaces; the terrace houses are empty shells ready to be bulldozed, a stark reminder of changing times. No wonder the oral testimonies proffered by the plaques look back and forward and feel disembodied when there’s soon to be no ‘here’ here.

Regeneration is typically styled as a grand plan, offering individualised hope (in this case) in the form of a little castle to call their own for everyone, but the plaques reveal this isn’t an unqualified good. The question remains: what does regeneration do to local attachments, to patterns and reference points that have been established? The narratives of the residents come from a transition zone where instability reigns and shared memory, already fragile, is about to be overwritten in the most literal of terms.

It’s not uncommon to get the sense that regeneration is largely done to people not with them; but the cross-currents of meaning uncovered when local voices can be heard unfiltered suggest a different approach might follow if more priority was given to the intrinsic value of being consulted. In the interim, we’re left to ponder in whose image, and from whose point of view is reality being re-modelled?

–

Thanks to co-lab media artist Kevin Carter and civic Architects, who have shared the photographs of the plaques with Open Plaques under a Creative Commons license. Some of the plaques no longer exist as the area has undergone phased redevelopment. We aim to act as an online archive and point of reference for lost plaques as well as those due to be removed.

See two views of the streets on Google Street View, and the Peer Plaques on Flickr and Open Plaques.

On the face of it, we don’t have the type of information which is readily expressed as assertions, i.e. simple statements of “fact”, such as you find in dbpedia. There’s lots of uncertainty, lots of imprecision (“provenance: Asia” – give me a break!), and many – sometimes conflicting – opinions about the history of material culture.

However, I think that there is also enough hard data to make the exercise worthwhile. I think, too, that we can usefully represent the uncertainty and imprecision as Linked Data, though the resulting RDF may be a little more complex than the sets of simplistic triples which you tend to find, for example, in dbpedia.

[image: Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/ ]

One thing I think we do need is some common points of reference. At present, the standard way of publishing say a museum collection as Linked Data is to invent a set of URLs for the collection objects (which is fine and necessary), but then to do the same for all related entities, such as people and places. Thus the British Museum Linked Data has:

http://collection.britishmuseum.org/id/person-institution/100221

…which is the identifier for the person Vardanes II. This URL is fine, but it is specific to the BM’s database. I assume he is the same Vardanes II who is described in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vardanes_II_of_Parthia

but there is nothing in the BM Linked Data to confirm (or refute) this.

One thing which I think we need in the cultural heritage field is a single Linked Data authority resource for personal identity. This authority should contain enough information about each person to allow automated processes to calculate the likelihood that two people are actually the same individual. Key facts would be name(s), and date and place of birth and death. [Sticking to dead people avoids Data Protection and libel issues ] Other potentially useful facts could be added: titles, gender, nationality, occupation, etc. However, the goal would not be to build an encyclopaedia of personal data, but just to have enough facts about each person to allow identity matching.

I’ve grabbed the 150,000 or so person entries from dbpedia which have dates of birth and death, and set them up as a stand-alone database. Having done this, I wanted to use the personal information in the Open Plaques data for a comparison test, to see how straightforward this sort of automated matching might be. I thought that there should be quite a big overlap between the sort of people who are considered noteworthy enough to be in Wikipedia, and those considered worthy of plaques.

Extracting the personal information from Open Plaques was my first challenge. I had found biographical details in the XML for plaques, but it was presented as escaped CDATA – not useful for my purposes. After a conversation about this with Jez Nicholson, nicely structured XML person authority data appeared as though by magic.

There is also an XML “index” which lists all the people who are represented in Open Plaques. I used this index in an XSLT transform, which grabbed all the records it mentioned and put them into a single source XML document (well, two: the XLST ran out of memory so the job had to be split into two chunks). In the process my transform reported 9 Open Plaques URLs in the index which didn’t point to a real resource – useful error-checking.

“But” I hear you say “surely Open Plaques’ XML outputs aren’t ‘proper’ Linked Data?”. Here is part of an example:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <openplaques  uri="http://openplaques.org/people/2166">
      <person  uri="http://openplaques.org/people/2166"updated_at="2011-06-27T12:28:39Z">
        <name>Joe Meek</name>
        <surname>Meek</surname>
        <born>
          <in>1929</in>
          <at  uri="http://openplaques.org/locations/3448">
            <address>1 Market Square, Newent, United Kingdom</address>
            <geo
reference_system="WGS84"latitude="51.9302"longitude="-2.40467"/>
          </at>
        </born>

This isn’t RDF. However, from my point of view it is just as good, because it has the two attributes I need:

* it is machine-processible, so I can select data, transform it, analyse it

* it uses persistent dereferenceable URLs to identify the concepts it is describing, so I can grab any related material I’m interested in. (You need either to stick ‘.xml’ on the end, or make an HTTP request where you specify that it’s an XML response that you want. Either way, you can use the standard XML document() function to access related resources.)

I now have a Modes data file containing just over 3,500 person records, and I’m all set to try my comparison with dbpedia. I’ll let you know how I get on.

–

About Richard Light

Richard has worked in the cultural heritage information retrieval field for over 30 years. A founding staff member of the Museum Documentation Association (now Collections Trust) from 1977 to 1991, he helped develop the current UK museum standards framework.

Since then as a freelancer Richard has additionally specialised in markup technologies as they impact cultural heritage information resources. With a particular interest in the potential of Linked Data techniques for cultural heritage, he has provided assistance to widely-used classification schemes (UDC, BLISS, SHIC, Israel Museum) in their attempts to move towards a Linked Data (SKOS) manifestation. Further posts on his XML, museums and linked data blog.

But first, the inscription from one of the plaques they photographed and contributed, which seems apt in the circumstances:

“Robert Owen 1771 – 1858. Welsh entrepreneur and social reformer whose ideas formed the basis of the world-wide co-operative movement. Lived and worked in Manchester for 12 years working first in a business on this site. c.1786.” [See the plaque here]

Q: Histonauts2 was a 2-day urban quest that happened as part of the city-wide Manchester Histories Festival that ran from 24th February to 4th March 2012. How did you fit into the programme – was there a particular theme or ethos in the Festival that you synched with?

Histonauts2 was part of a wider CRESC-funded research project run by the Institute for Cultural Practices (ICP at the University of Manchester) called MMXII: Mapping Manchester. As well as designing and running the game, the ICP also mapped the Manchester Histories Festival programme, and held a summit that brought together groups and organisations from the North West that were doing work with mapping or interested in mapping.

The game complemented the ethos of the MHF. It’s about getting people actively engaged in history, encouraging them to walk around the city and notice things that they might normally ignore. We pitched the idea to Claire Turner the Festival Director and she was really excited about it. In fact we ended up borrowing a phrase from their About Us page: “revealing the hidden histories from across Greater Manchester.”

Q: I’ve seen Histonauts described as ‘urban archeology’, and also as a digital treasure hunt. Are these fair descriptions and how would you pitch it to a newcomer?

I think they are fair descriptions. The archaeology metaphor translates really neatly across from physical to digital. Archaeologists dig down through the strata of the Earth to reveal the layers of time, whilst our players were digitally adding layers of meaning to buildings, locations, and objects in the physical world.

We love the idea that you could take an object in a museum or archive and digitally replace it in the location it was originally discovered. In a way it’s like reverse archaeology!

Q: The inclusion of Open Plaques data in the quest came together at the last minute – two days before the event – through a brief exchange on Twitter. Can you recap what data of ours you referred to and how you included it in the game?

I saw Frankie Roberto of Open Plaques talk at Culture Hack North in Leeds, and when one of our players took a photo of a blue plaque I was suddenly reminded of Open Plaques. The potential for collaboration was obvious. We focused on the plaques in Manchester that hadn’t yet been photographed, aiming to document as many of them as possible in a day. Getting photographs was included as a Daily Mission, which proved to be a really effective way of keeping players engaged and interested in the game.

Q: Did our ‘open data‘ policy function as an enabler to speeding up decision-making following your initial thought that Open Plaques resources could be used, or didn’t that come into it?

It definitely influenced our decision to partner with Open Plaques. We’d had minor issues before with players trying to link to non-Creative Commons images on Flickr, et cetera, so we were keen to work with open images / data as much as possible.

Of course we’re also committed to keeping all of our data open. Once we’ve had the chance to clean up everything we’ll share the GoogleDocs and Fusion Tables for everyone to play with.

Q: Apart from free, easy and pre-mapped access to the data, what was the main attraction of using the plaques?

The Daily Missions were flexible, and often changed in direct response to the kinds of things that the players had been uncovering. The plaques were perfect objects for engagement. They are the kind of thing that people walk past every day without noticing but that are really rich in content and historical significance.

Having them already mapped also added a slightly different element to the game. Previous missions specified themes but not locations, and had players finding whatever they could on their walks around the city. This was far more of a targeted hunt.

Q: What other data or objects did you use as ‘treasure’ and how were they incorporated?

*checks the hashtag archive* We asked players to find road names with historical significance, seek out the birth dates of buildings, take up-to-date versions of photos from Manchester Archives Plus, find places related to Manchester’s rich musical heritage, find other players (identified by their badges), and to document MHF events.

Q: What were the mechanics, rules and objectives of the game?

The timescale and resources were such that we had to design a game that didn’t require much maintenance. We wanted players to have both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for continuing the game, so there were points given for each secret history ‘uncovered’, with the promise of a prize at the end.

To shape the intrinsic reward mechanism I used the nef 5 Ways to Wellbeing
model, ensuring that over the 10 days the players were encouraged to Connect, Be Active, Take Notice, Keep Learning, and Give. [The rules and intsructions are here].

Q: What tools did you use to communicate with the participants, and to co-ordinate the content gathered in the digital treasure hunt. Was there any cost to these? What web services and devices did the players need to have?

We had to use web tools that were freely available to all, and that people were familiar with. Google Docs were useful for player signup, and I used a Google Site to collate all of the information, which was stored on Google Spreadsheets and Fusion Tables. Daily Missions and nightly rankings were sent out via email and Twitter, and the combination of photos and geo-location meant that Twitter (for easy web and mobile access) was really the easiest and most familiar way for players to get content to us.

Q: How many people took part and who were they? Did everyone have the same level of involvement or was there scope for varying degrees of commitment? How was success judged?

We had 39 players sign up, and 17 actually contribute secret histories via Twitter. We’re planning to send a survey round to all of the participants very soon, to get an idea of the kind of people who played. But anecdotally we know that there was a fairly wide range, from history PhD students to chartered accountants.

In terms of commitment, the top 3 players contributed the vast majority of secret histories, almost twice as many as the other 14 active players combined.

15 Plaques found today for @openplaques – that’s 20% of all the plaques with missing images in Manchester! #outstandingwork

— UniverCityCulture (@UniCityCulture) February 27, 2012

Q: How did it all pan out and what feedback did you get from the players at the time and afterwards?

It went amazingly well. Far better than we could have anticipated, and with very little publicity or lead-in time. Again, we haven’t had time to properly collate the email and Twitter feedback yet, but it was all really positive with people saying that they’d learned loads and had fun doing it.

Q: Histonauts has happened once before. When and where was that? Was the format the same or have you evolved it much?

Histonauts2 is actually the 3rd game that we’ve run as part of the UniverCityCulture pilot research project. The previous two were more traditional hunts/challenges using QR codes placed at historically interesting locations around the University of Manchester campus. This time wanted to evolve the game to be a little looser, not always restricting players to a predefined set of locations.

The games have all been really successful, and we’re keen to evolve the concept further and have been in talks with the MHF about designing a massive ARG (alternate reality game) for the 2014 festival. We’re secretly incredibly excited about the prospect of a longer R&D period, larger resources, more partner organisations, and hundreds or thousands of participants!

Shout out to all the #histonauts2 who hunted down unphotographed Manchester plaques @mcrhistfest 2day (@UniCityCulture) bit.ly/wfoGo6

— Open Plaques (@openplaques) February 27, 2012

Q: Where did you first get the idea from, any particular inspirations? Does it continue in the lineage of any other ‘pervasive games’, and how does it depart from or build upon them?

​I’ve wanted to try my hand at game design ever since I heard about Jane McGonigal’s World Without Oil back in 2007. The opportunity came with the first phase of this research project, and since then the idea has grown and evolved and been influenced by countless other projects.

The UniverCityCulture project started after seeing this Mashable article on Harvard’s collaboration with Foursquare, and drew inspiration from Historypin, scvngr, the Google Maps Mania blog, Larkin’ About, Decoding Art, and many more projects that we’ve found or been sent via Twitter. The whole process has been iterative and always responsive to changing demands and technologies. We already have a Histonauts3 tentatively planned for Freshers’ Week in September this year.

Q: Returning to the whole public-cum-digital archaeology concept, do you think the hidden or at least unmapped raw materials of the city’s past hold out a lot of untapped promise for further ventures?

I think Histonauts2 specifically and Manchester Histories Festival in general has shown that there’s a huge appetite for history and heritage in Manchester, and that people want to play an active part in documenting, uncovering, and creating that history.

Great crowdsourced projects like Open Plaques and Wikipedia work because they bring people together doing hard, meaningful work, and making a genuine contribution to the body of knowledge around a particular subject through co-creation.

Jane McGonigal talks about an ‘epic meaning’ behind any game that drives engagement and participation. Perhaps the aim for the next couple of games will be this more ‘serious play’. Play with purpose.

Q: With the material world as your primary focus here – as opposed to relying on augmented reality for primary stimulus and counterposing physical / virtual layers – do you see digital technologies and media primarily as aids to discovery and documenting of public space, or more than that, have the two worlds actually merged?

I think we’re quite happy to accept the idea of things (locations, groups, businesses, movements) existing both physically and digitally and those two areas not necessarily being temporally or spatially defined or aligned. Good and useful digital technologies just allow us to do the same things we ever did faster, better, and with more people. It’s my hope that the more mobile they become, the more they will provide a route to actual human interaction. Now that we’re not chained to desktops any more we should be able to meet and talk and do things together, either facilitated by digital tech or not.

Q: What are the main creative and cultural opportunities that you see now and on the horizon for digitally enhanced collaborative history, mapping, annotation, and the like? Is the public’s role and the way things can be done in this space noticeably shifting?

Obviously the widespread adoption of smartphones makes this kind of work far easier. I really like the Historypin app and the way you can blend old photos with what you see through your phone’s camera. I love the NWFA Time Machine app too, it makes really simple and clever use of archive footage with geolocation.

Q: There’s a broader academic and research backdrop to this, with a number of organisations and partners in the mix. Could you clarify and briefly outline how this jigsaw puzzle fits together?

It’s wonderfully confusing. The Institute for Cultural Practices (ICP) is part of the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures (SAHC) at the University of Manchester.

I recently graduated from the ICP MA programme in Arts Management. But my real job is as Director of The Big Art People (tBAP), an arts organisation that works with academic, arts, heritage, corporate, and community partners. We’ve worked with the ICP on a number of projects, and as an official University supplier we provide research assistance and project management services.

So the first QR hunt game, Campus Obscura, was funded from the SAHC retention fund, aiming to engage students with the history of the campus. The second QR hunt game, Histonauts, was with Larkin’ About and Contact Theatre, and was really just a bit of fun and a chance to test some new game mechanics.

The third game, Histonauts2 was part of the MMXII: Mapping Manchester project that I mentioned at the start. We’ve also got a couple more games on the way that we’ll hopefully be announcing soon!

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Thanks to Jim Ralley and all the histonauts2 organisers and participants for contributing to Open Plaques whilst exploring their city’s past. See all the plaques they added plus other photos from the Festival in this Flickr set.

If you would like to use our data for a game, history tour, education project or any other purpose, we’d love to hear from you. See our About and Data pages.

[IMAGE CREDITS: The plaque photographs above were contributed to Open Plaques by Histonauts2 players thanks to Creative Commons licensing and Flickr machinetags. The mascot is courtesy of Histonauts / The Big Art People]

No one expects plaques to be around forever. English Heritage – with a focus on preservation and the long-term – say their currently manufactured plaques for London are estimated to remain in good condition for at least 100 years. But quite apart from the longevity guaranteed by their materials, some plaques suddenly disappear, while others exist on a knife-edge in fragile circumstances…

Case 1: George Boole – Cork, Ireland

Not a household name granted, but you may have heard of Boolean algebra or indeed Boolean logic – the theory that underpins all digital computing. In short, if it wasn’t for mathematician and scientist George Boole (born in Lincoln, England and resident of Cork city in Ireland from 1849 when he became Professor of Mathematics at University College Cork until his death in 1864) – you might not be reading this, nor I writing here. Humankind may have not landed on the moon. I could go on…

The father of modern computing’s former home in Cork where this plaque is situated has been neglected for many years. Then in February 2012, despite being on the Cork City register of protected structures (which means that, by rights, it cannot be demolished) the building has been put up for sale to developers. Yes those developers – the commercial entities who build private housing, car-parks, shopping centres and suchlike.

Cork science lecturer and blogger Eoin Lettice has the full story on his Communicate Science blog, and is assiduoulsy tracking the treatment of Boole’s home and scientific heritage in previous and no doubt future posts. The question posed in his blog remains unanswered – is Irish heritage now for sale to the highest bidder?

Case 2: Miles Coverdale – York Minster, York

The spread of literacy beyond the priviledged few in Britain was due in part to the translation of the Bible from Latin into English, and under Cromwell this became a material reality within reach of the masses, even if they couldn’t all fully avail of it. For that, in large part, we have Bishop of Exeter Miles Coverdale (1488-1569) to thank.

This plaque – marking the former site of York Minster Library where copies of Coverdale’s translations of the Bible and the Book Of Common Prayer were kept until 1820 – has met an even more drastic fate. It was recently stolen, yet another loss in the spate of plaque thefts sweeping the UK and elsewhere whereby metal markers are swiped by criminals who sell them on for scrap and the objects are melted down and recycled.

Credit goes to @HistoryNeedsYou for alerting us to the Coverdale case. Other headline-grabbing thefts apart from plaques have included the massive Barabara Hepworth scuplture ‘Two Forms (Divided Circle)’ valued at £500,000 taken overnight from Dulwich Park in south London on 19th December 2011.

It’s no exaggeration to say this crime-wave is literally destroying public culture. But should all metal-based art and markers in public spaces now be put under lock and guard; and if not, what is the right response? Perhaps The Londonist or some other publication with bite and an active community of readers could host a public discussion on this. We urgently need some workable ideas.

Case 3: Luke Howard – Tottenham, London

Luke Howard is one of those characters surfaced by our project whom I’d never heard of before, but even before realising his plaque was at risk he was already ingrained in the Open Plaques team’s collective memory by way of his delightful role – ‘namer of clouds’. The home of this key figure in the history of meterology has seen better times.

His plaque was put up by English Heritage but the building at 7 Bruce Grove, in North London is in a sorry state. The bigger picture revealed when it was photographed in 2009 shows it surrounded by hoardings with part of the roof missing and the structure in general disrepair. We don’t have the full story with this one, but maybe this blog post will help unearth it.

What this case shows is that getting a plaque – even one on a listed building as the sign visible on Google Streetview proves – is still no guarantee that a building will be maintained and looked after. Maybe there is work going on to restore it… we will see what transpires.

Case 4: The Keskidee building – Islington, London

On 7th April 2011 this building received the plaque that it had been nominated for, and then voted for, by the public in the annual Islington People’s Plaques scheme run by the Borough Council. It was the site of Britain’s first ever arts and cultural centre for the black community opened in 1971, and also played a starring role as the location in which the video for Bob Marley’s song ‘Is This Love’ was filmed in 1978.

The contrast of the happy celebrations pictured above at the unveiling with the turn of events exactly 11 months later last week couldn’t be starker. Islington Council Heritage Services contacted us on Friday to alert us to the news that the building commemorated in this plaque had been gutted in a fire [pictures] on Thursday 8th March. The plaque, remarkably, remains intact and unscathed on the exterior front wall, but the building itself is largely a shell. What caused the blaze isn’t yet determined.

You can see a clip of the Bob Marley video shot inside and see more prictures of the building after the blaze in the Islington Gazzette news story. We interviewed two of the council’s Heritage Services team late last year about the scheme, now in its third year. The People’s Plaques initiative continues to flourish, with global voting now open for 2012′s shortlist until 10th April, despite the harsh reversal of fortune for built heritage revealed in this plaque’s story.

The next chapter…

What exactly has or will happen to each of these four plaques and heritage flashpoints remains uncertain. The cases illustrate how public heritage depends not only on effective planning controls and preservation funds, but also on a social contract (for want of a better term) that allows them to be public in the first place.

Any number of parties can break or threaten that contract – as we have seen. The moot question is whether we’re collectively resigned to attacks on and erosion of public history, or whether we can do anything re-animate, support and defend it. Do we perhaps need to re-frame how we think about and sustain the whole concept of heritage?

If you know of any plaques at risk – or that have already disappeared – let us know here in the comments, by email or via Twitter. Equally, if you have photographs of missing plaques, please consider donating them to our online collection, which in such unfortunate cases, is also a digital archive.

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[PHOTO CREDITS: With thanks and acknowledgement to the following - Boole by John Collins; Coverdale by Le Monde1 on Flickr (full copyright retained); Howard by Jane Parker on Flickr (full copyright retained); Keskidee by Islington Borough Heritage Services]

“Plaques to commemorate fictional characters are increasingly popular: Lara Croft, Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes all have their own. We’d like to hear readers’ suggestions for who to add to the list and where their plaque should go.”

Any ideas? Paddington Bear? Del Boy? James Bond?

We already have several fictional characters featured in Open Plaques’ expanding collection of 6,500 historic markers and members of public can add more. Film, TV, book and comedy characters all feature. Here’s a few…

Sherlock Holmes (books, TV, films) – London, East Dean and Switzerland

Leopold Bloom (from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses) – Portobello, Dublin

Mickey and Minnie Mouse (movie stars) – holidayed in Hastings, Sussex

Mr. Tope (chief verger of the cathedral in ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ by Charles Dickens) – Rochester, Kent

Sooty (TV puppet legend) and Harry Corbett – North Pier, Blackpool

Who’s on your fictional wishlist?

We’re very pleased to announce that @openplaques will be attending the Culture Code Hack in Newcastle on 24th/25th March 2012 as a ‘cultural organisation with data to provide’.

We will be represented by Lead Developer Jez Nicholson @jnicho02. By day, Jez is Head of Technology at Argyll Environmental, but by night he builds the code behind the Open Plaques platform. He is not alone in this endeavour, as we have a small multi-disciplinary team of developers.

What is Open Plaques?

For the uninitiated, Open Plaques is a co-curation platform used to create and refine a central record of commemorative plaques throughout the world.

Born Free

A key aim of the project is to use and create open data. Right from the beginning we wanted to explore being ‘open’ and took the brave decision to release the data under a Public Domain Dedication and License 1.0. Historical plaques by their very nature are objects in the public domain, so creating a platform to collect them with the public – and for the collected data to be available for the broadest possible public use – seemed an obvious premise to start from.

Joining The Dots

All of the photos on Open Plaques come from other sites (mostly Flickr and Wikimedia Commons). We do this by tagging photos with the corresponding plaque id and then linking to them. In this way we ‘join the dots’ in the internet rather than try to corner the information market. It also means we link and collaborate with big communities that already exist, instead of trying to replicate or compete with them. This also helps our contributors, as many of them are already using or familiar with and trust in these larger platforms.

The Museum In The Street

Those little historical markers we see every day dotted around our landscape are physical and symbolic portholes through time, anchoring past events to a physical place in the present. But our experience of them is largely fleeting, easily forgotten. They’re a very public representation of what and whom our culture chooses to value (NB: anyone can put up a plaque if they get the building owner’s permission and can pay for the plaque’s manufacture). What if each encapsulated story was instantly accessible – on your smartphone for example – with its backstory and context linked? How would our experience of places and history change if we could knit these objects in the material world together with the fabric of the web?

Hack The Plaque

The data is easy to get to. We have designed the system to be RESTful and most pages have XML and JSON views. In plain English that means that the URLS of the site are simple, sensible and should make sense to humans and that if you add .xml or .json to the address you will see the same thing but as data.

Hacking isn’t all about programming and data though. Think of it as taking raw materials and playing with them to create something new, be it a concept, a design, a software application, an artwork. This isn’t ‘work’… you’re not trying to build a new business… the only limit is our imaginations. Here are a few things that people have already done with plaques and with our data:

OpenPlaques itself

The team came together at Yahoo! OpenHack 2009. We’ve since held an Open Plaques Open Day where interested parties came along and helped redesign the user experience of the site.

Ian Ozsvald’s AI Challenge

A programming challenge to build Optical Character Reading (OCR) software that can read the words off of a plaque. Ian is writing a book about artificial intelligence and also runs a group for AI programmers. OCR is mostly used to read documents. Reading words in the street is more difficult as there are reflections, angles, curved surfaces, etc.

Blue Plaque Cycle Tours

BikeMinded and BetterByBike both run cycle tours of blue plaques that are very popular.

The Street of Blue Plaques – part of the E17 Arts Trail festival

In September 2011 Danny Coope took information from 19th century censuses and created a series of blue plaques celebrating some ordinary former residents of Grosvenor Park Road, Walthamstow.

Southampton ECS Web Team Blue Plaque Generator

Christopher Gutteridge went to the Open Data Hack Day in Oxford and wrote a blue plaque generator that finds a piece of historical information from dbpedia about your location and creates a blue plaque for it.

History Hack Day, The Guardian offices, 2011

At http://historyhackday.org/ a number of the hacks used our data. Tom Morris wrote a guest blog post for us about it.

Data exchange with Aimer Media for an upcoming e-book

Aimer Media came to us to discuss the work they are doing for a Plaques of London e-book. They decided to do a data exchange with us where they donated their list of 1800 London plaques and we would add Open Plaques ids to their list and add any missing ones to our database. In response, we built a matcher that works with spreadsheet lists loaded into Google Docs.

Some ideas

• A heatmap of plaques in London connected to property prices. Do famous people live in expensive houses?
• A tweetbot that responds to questions about plaques by finding them in the database.
• UX designs for sifting through 20,000 blue plaque photos from Wikimedia Commons.
• Generating printable maps that Councils could publish on their own web sites.
• A web site where people can nominate subjects and donate money to have a plaque erected.
• An analysis of whom/what is chosen to be commemorated and how it has changed over time. In the 50′s it was all classical composers, now it is authors, actors and footballers?
• Plaque spotting games