History Hack Day

This past weekend was the world’s first History Hack Day at The Guardian offices in London. This follows on from an increasing specialisation of hack days: we’ve gone from general hack days to hack days specifically on mobile technology (Over the Air), Twitter (WarbleCamp), science, music, charity, culture and now history.

The weekend was put together by Matt Patterson who started the event by describing a vision of how a now ubiquitous web tool like Google Maps could have layers of the past attached. Imagine pulling out your smartphone and in addition to showing you the route from the railway station to the pub, it’d also show you what the streets used to be called, the industries and trades that used to operate where the identikit shopping centre now lies, a few glimpses into the sort of people who lived here and the ideas, rituals and objects they centered their lives around.

Jez Nicholson, Simon Harriyott and I were there to fly the flag for Open Plaques. We helped a few hackers use the Open Plaques data but also worked on our own projects. But for me, as well as slinging Ruby and SQL and Java and what not, it was interesting to see what people were building on a purely academic level. While there are APIs and open data sets becoming available for pots and pans and buildings, the next step for me is to integrate the history of ideas: I think the history of philosophers, religious figures, writers, scientists and most importantly their ideas frame the world as much, if not slightly more, than kings, tyrants and presidents.

With that said, let’s have a look at what people did build, some of which used data from Open Plaques:

First up, Simon Cross (from Facebook) and Seyi Ogunyemi built an Open Plaques hack in Python called Plaquathon which used Facebook Places to let you check into plaques. At the Open Plaques Open Day last year, integration with location-based social networking or some kind of social game aspect to Open Plaques seemed like something we’d like to have, so it was nice to see this being put together so quickly.

Data from Open Plaques was also used by Morena Fiore and Chris Lock in a hack called “Price Re-enactment Adjustment Tool” (or “PRAT” for short) which showed (with a good deal of guesswork and fiction!) the effect of the Blitz on house prices. Buildings getting blown up nearby tended to lower house prices, while a celebrity moving in bumped the price back up. And by ‘celebrities’, they mean someone with a plaque. Finally: a piece of software that thinks Bertrand Russell is more worthy of the title ‘celebrity’ than Kerry Katona.

There were two trains-related hacks: Paul Downey and his son Jed attempted to uncover details about historical railways, while Simon Harriyott built geStation, which shows the evolution of the UK’s rail network from 1786 onwards and used dbpedia, the RDF version of Wikipedia. (We’ll have to wait for “transport hack day” before someone builds a hack to make the trains actually run on time!)

Wikipedia data was behind some other hacks too: Mike Stenhouse’s Pokemonarchs attempted to build a Pokémon-style card game from people, with importance derived from the number of results from Google Scholar, while the amount of edits to the person’s Wikipedia article measuring the amount of controversy they cause (George W. Bush, who has 40,723 edits, squarely beats both Jesus and Adolf Hitler on that front).

Also using Wikipedia data was Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin’s History of the World in 100 Seconds which plots geotagged historical events on a map over time and shows how Western-centric history is, how Western-centric Wikipedians are (they acknowledge that), or possibly both.

My own modest little hack is one to try and get more people out there creating free culture by photographing objects and places in the real world that have been requested by free culture projects in response to them “checking in” on location-based services like Foursquare. Currently, it is for Wikipedia, but will hopefully also integrate with Open Plaques. With a bit of luck, someone will check into a café for lunch and their phone will tell them to go and take photos of plaques and Roman ruins and other bits of urban miscellany. Rather than tie myself down to any specific mobile platform, I’m building a web front end and also a Twitter interface because that’s a lot easier than learning, oh, Objective-C, Cocoa, the Android APIs, C#, XNA and the Windows Phone APIs. Interestingly, I don’t think we saw any hacks presented that were built for a specific mobile platform rather than for the Web.

Cristiano Betta produced a hack that was rated ‘Best of Show’ by the judges: a mobile version of A History of the World in 100 Objects, such that you can listen to the BBC programmes on a smartphone while seeing the real object in the British Museum. Cristiano has written it up for his blog.

One of the more surreal hacks was Brian Suda’s ‘Titanic Matching’ app which lets you call up on a phone and matches you to a Titanic passenger, then tells you what happens to them.

No hack day would be complete without something very silly from Tom Scott, and this time it was an app called “The Magical Mystical Ley Line Locator” which takes your postcode and shows you all the mystical ley lines you might be on. ‘Mystical’ being a code word for bullshit, of course.

While hack day projects often do not turn into enduring projects (Open Plaques itself is one that did!), they do showcase what amazing things people can do when dosed up on caffeine and pizza and given access to data. For me, they vindicate the openness of projects like Wikipedia and Open Plaques, and hopefully serve as an invitation to companies and governments to join the web of linked data, preferably linked open data.


Also, be sure to go and read Jeremy Keith’s blog post about the event.

[image courtesy of Adactio on Flickr]

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What is a ‘plaque’ anyway?

So, what exactly is a plaque…or to be more precise, what is the acceptance criteria for openplaques? The obvious ones are blue, round and issued by English Heritage in London, but once you start looking you quickly find that there are many plaques not managed by EH. In fact, we now have 341 different issuing organisations listed.

Plaque inscriptions often follow a pattern and almost have their own syntax which is how we can automatically parse many of them. The majority are in the format “[person name] [born]-[died] [roles] [verb]” for example plaque #1 reads, ”George Seferis 1900-1971 Greek Ambassador, poet and Nobel laureate lived here 1957-1962″. I’d count this as a class 1 plaque.

Photo of plaque
Photographer: Gwynhafyr. Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Some plaques commemorate events or places… plaque #1091 reads, ”Near this spot the General Letter Office stood in Post House Yard 1653-1666 Here were struck in 1661 the first postmarks in the world”. This gives us two connections: the General Letter Office stood here; and the first postmarks in the world were struck here.

Photo of plaque
Photographer: Gwynhafyr. Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial License.

The general rule is that the plaque commemorates someone/something that happened at or near the location of the plaque.

We don’t include burial place markers, grave stones, memorials or foundation stones. However, we try to accomodate interesting special cases. A favourite of mine is the victim of The 1831 Brighton Trunk Murder “Beneath this path are deposited portions of the remains of Celia Holloway who was brutally murdered in the Lovers Walk of this parish in the year of Christ 1831 aged 32 years.”


Photo of plaque
Photographer: J’Roo. Licence: Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Then you’ve just got the weird and wonderful to fit in somehow:

“First bomb of World War One to fall from a zeppelin on London dropped in the garden of The Nevill Arms Public House 30 May 1915

“Mario Lanza Ghostwriter haunts here”

“At this fearful place, Sherlock Holmes vanquished Professor Moriarty, on 4 May 1891″…that’s at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland

“From 1878 to 1893 as Newton Heath (LYR) C & FC and later Newton Heath FC. Manchester United played here on the North Road Ground.”

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Building the Web of Meaning

During and since the Open Plaques Open Day, Tom Morris has been building in RDF features into our site. I knew that this is all about linking up Open Plaques to Freebase and other online databases, but I didn’t quite understand the why and wherefores. Tom gave me this explanation:

RDF is a way of describing the relationship between things using graphs. If HTML is the language of documents, RDF is a language of ‘things’. (The comparison is not perfect, but it’s not bad.)

RDF works by building up a graph structure using a lot of individual statements like:

  • Joe knows Jane
  • Jane knows John
  • John went to school with Joe
  • Joe is a person

Now imagine that you took those statements and split them up into their separate parts.

  • [Joe] [knows] [Jane]
  • [Jane] [knows] [John]
  • [John] [went to school with] [Joe]
  • [Joe] [is a] [Person]

A computer could take this and draw a directed acyclic graph with it, with each of the arcs of the graph labelled.

RDF specifies the abstract form of this graph and specifies what types of data can be used.

So, in our example

[Joe] [knows] [Jane]

Joe is the subject.

knows is the predicate: it is a two-place predicate – basically you can imagine a form where you had _____ knows _____. You can fill in both.

Jane is the object.

The RDF specification simply says what can go in those three slots.

There are three types of data in RDF-land:

A URI, which is basically like a global name.

A ‘blank node’, which does the same thing as a URI but cannot be pointed to.

A literal – either a string or something that can be defined in terms of a string (like a number or date or boolean value).

What you then do is replace each ‘thing’ with a URI (if practical, if not you use a blank node), and each relationship between things or property of that thing with a URI.

So you end up with:

<http://example.org/joe> <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/knows>
<http://example.org/jane>

This says that example.org/joe has a foaf:knows relationship to example.org/jane

Why do this? Because you can merge graph models easily.

If you want to know a little bit more about RDF, have a look at What is RDF and the W3C RDF Primer. If you want to get your hands dirty with some hacking, I’ve written a tutorial on semanticweb.org called Getting data from the Semantic Web which shows you how to get data from Dbpedia using an interactive Python shell.

RDFa is simply a syntax that is used to let you express RDF statements on web pages. It’s been around for a while, although there are still some open questions about how it’s going to work with HTML 5. RDF is just the abstract model: there are lots of different syntaxes: RDFa basically makes HTML into an RDF syntax.

One thing you can do with RDF is express same-as relationships. This is where it becomes really useful: if you’ve got two databases that have something that is represented by the same real-world object in all senses, you can use a shared URL to say that it is the same thing.

http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#sameAs

One of the main things that the initial RDFa release on OpenPlaques is doing is declaring sameAs relationships between every person on OpenPlaques and their equivalent in Dbpedia. The database already contains this information as the text descriptions of people is being pulled from article ledes on Wikipedia.

The focus on sameAs declarations is fundamental to the current ‘linked data’ movement. With the RDFa release on Open Plaques, we’ve joined that emerging web of linked data.

On this giant map of linked data, each circle is a database that is being linked together through sameAs links – right in the centre is Dbpedia, which is data parsed automatically from Wikipedia. That means it has a set of data which describes entities of some sort, and they’ve worked out how to say that those entities are the same as entities in other data sets.

What’s cool about all this is that software can explore the data on all these sites and services without needing to use special APIs – there is a common format for exploring the whole graph of data.

sameas.org lets you see those links: if you tap in ‘London’, you’ll see a bunch of URIs which represent London including things from dbpedia, geonames, data.gov.uk, freebase, New York Times and so on. Now that we have linked OpenPlaques up, the next time the Sindice crawler comes around, it’ll look at the sameAs links and do the same thing for all the people in the database.

The question then becomes: for everything else in the database, who else do we link to? And who will link to OpenPlaques? That’s really the best description of RDF and the Semantic Web I can think of: databases with hyperlinks that computers can follow.

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Cultural plaques: a New York state of mind

Of all the cities in the world you’d expect New York to have some commemorative plaques, surely. But in the (slightly over) one year lifetime of the Open Plaques project few had surfaced. Until, searching Flickr for photos a few weeks back, Simon stumbled on an entire constellation of them. How had we managed to miss them before? Well, it’s the colour stupid. Oh, and the name.

Turns out our NYC cousins have many kinds of plaques but the large set Simon uncovered is red, and they’re termed “cultural medallions”. When you’re searching on keywords and dealing in data these attributes and descriptors make all the difference.

Dotted around New York City, with clusters in Manhattan and a sprinkling elsewhere in the Five Boroughs, the figures they commemorate exude a chutzpah that only the city which has bedazzled the globe could generate. There are plenty of Twentieth century icons and many are suitably edgy, such as James Cagney, Cecil B. deMille, George Gershwin, John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Houdini, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

It’s tempting to believe there’s something to be read into the fact that the plaque which triggered this discovery was none other than that for artist, taste maker and impresario of the original pop culture multimedia event – namely Andy Warhol.

The man who coined the phrase “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” has acted as the connector and gateway (via the prolific wallyg‘s photo) to a significant upscaling of New York’s location and presence in this service we’re collectively building. Call me biased (and I am) but isn’t this serendipity squared?

The typographical and design template for the plaques themselves was created free of cost by influential New Yorker and Italian-born designer Massimo Vignelli, who among other things also designed this iconic NYC subway map in 1972 [detailed view].

Our more humble map is below.

The red medallion scheme itself numbers some 44 plaques so far, and was started in 1995 by the Historic Landmark’s Preservation Center, a privately funded not-for-profit organisation operated to raise awareness of and actively support the city’s heritage.

Other non-red plaques abound in NYC of course, including ones for Theoodore Roosvelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, Dorothy Parker, The Algonquin Hotel, and one for Thomas Paine in Greenwich Village. Paine was born in Thetford, Norfolk and later moved to Lewes, Sussex (both in Britain) before moving to France and criss-crossing the pond thereafter, a key figure in the French Revolution and the American War Of Independence. His 59 Grove St, Greenwich Village plaque just happens to have a red-painted border on the surrounding brickwork.

Photo courtesy of Tony the Misfit on FlickrWe’ve already got dozens of plaques from the USA included on our service, but this much expanded New York set presents a ripe opportunity for plaque hunters – that’s you residents of and visitors to NYC! – to contribute their photos to the listings we’ve now added.

So help us create a fuller picture of this particular state of mind. Browse our list, photograph some, add any new plaques you find to the website and help us build it!

[photos CC: courtesy of wallyg and TonyTheMisfit]

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Open Plaques Open Day: UX and Design group

The nature of the Open Plaques project to date has seen the content and functionality grow through incremental updates and improvements. While these changes have really enriched the project, what our group wanted to do is step back and re-ask the questions that define the user experience of Openplaques.org and to see if we can make any improvements.

The discussions within the group threw up as many questions as answers as we tried to understand our target audience, plotting the kind of journeys users might adopt and how we can use design to facilitate these paths. One topic that came up was our usage of maps and how we can make it more relevant to the data displayed, (or, indeed, if on occasions maps were necessary at all).

It was really useful to have such an enthusiastic team coming up with ideas to intrigue and excite users, offering an incentive to click through and hop around the data. (perhaps in a similar way to how one can in Wikipedia). This has resulted in the addition of featured or related plaques on many of the page views with the goal to try and create some form of narrative that can be unique to each visitor’s interests.

Plaque level detail
Plaque level detail

Consensus reached on these issues resulted in a series of wireframes re-defining the information existing already in a way that is hopefully more relevant and useful to the people who are going to use it. Today, designs are being drawn up based upon this work and will be rolled out in the near future!

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Open Plaques Open Day: content group

With the Open Plaques project it’s difficult to separate content from technology – where does one end and the other start, and are they even usefully separated? But thanks to the team assembled in the Content working group at our Open Day on 25th September, we had a surfeit of experience on both fronts and no such issues. A wonderful venue (C4CC), delicious food (Niven’s) and supersize helpings of enthusiasm completed the circle.

Following four opening presentations from Frankie Roberto, Emily Toop, Ian Ozsvald and Richard Varhman (more on those in future posts), the attendees broke into three groups (the others being Development and User Interface/User Experience). We in the Content group were a motley crew – developers, pervasive game designers, entrepreneurial geeks, web content and community folk, and Open Plaques enthusiasts – and we were all the better for it. It was challenging but equally fun and hugely exciting to brainstorm, document and discuss the possibilities for the site with people from such diverse backgrounds.

We’d been planning the day for two months and I’d already drawn up a list of topics and ideas for the Content group but what amazed me,  as I stepped into role of facilitator, was not just that almost all those ideas bubbled up unprompted (and heaps more great suggestions too!) but the level of debate, finessing, and speedy prioritisation that animated the group’s discussions.

One minute we pondered triage of email enquiries, user feedback and bug tracking, the next we were debating what is a page and what is just an attribute? Media feeds, content curation, guerilla plaques, and guided / unguided tours were considered, as were geocaching, timelines, waymarking, and becoming the default support service for the multitude of resource-stretched plaque erecting bodies. At one point I started to draw a (slightly wonky) Venn diagram of the Open Plaques service’s main constituents, which the group then helped in completing.

The sheer volume of ideas could have overwhelmed other groupings, but we navigated the chaos and worked through them from a number of perspectives: type of user, page types, content types, and types of participation, to name a few. These approaches helped us juggle the ballooning list of ideas while thinking about how the nuts and bolts of content fitted together both practically and strategically.

When we re-convened after lunch the ideas were still flowing, but we soon knuckled down to some “must-haves” and key outcomes that we thought would help improve the (still very much Alpha) website and move things forward.

In no way is what we ended with a finished plan, as the Open Day was about opening-up, collaborating and laying the groundwork for further community and website building. Everyone who participated in the Content group played a very active and valuable part, and this was mirrored elsewhere. Through hours of deep confab the Technology group did some actual hacking and developing, and the UI/UX group (pictured above) produced well-rounded concepts and wireframes.

A special mention goes to Emily Toop who had already built the Open Plaques iPhone app from our data, and which is now in the App Store! In the next few months we’re planning to get stuck into more of the key ideas that were collectively cooked up on the day. If you were there and have any comments or weren’t there but want to get involved, we’d love to hear from you!

[Photos of the day can be seen on Flickr]

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John Lennon Plaque unveiled by Yoko Ono today

My first attendance at a plaque unveiling today, and it was a biggie. Yoko Ono unveiled the plaque to her late husband John Lennon outside their house in Montagu Square, London.

Yoko Ono Yoko Ono unveiling the plaque

John Lennon's new plaque Plaque photographers

Lots of people attended, and the three speakers followed by Yoko summed up John Lennon’s impact upon the world and the importance of the location.

A lot of work by English Heritage went into the day, and more importantly the process of research, planning and legal work to create and install the plaque.

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Registration open for our Open Day

Hi all. As previously announced, we’re holding an Open Day about Open Plaques on Saturday 25th September 2010 at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in London. It’s completely free, including lunch, and registration is now open. Before you go ahead and register though, I thought I’d explain briefly what the plans for the day are.

Open Plaques is well over a year old now, and has gone from being a pet project and quick hack built over the course of a weekend to a web service containing the most comprehensive listing of more than two and a half thousand heritage plaques contributed to by dozens of people.

Open Plaques London map

We realise, though, that the website is still a little impenetrable for the average user, and that there’s currently no easy way to correct or add to the data without being part of the core team.

For these reasons, the Open Day is a chance to look back on where we’ve got to so far, and to think about where we should go in the future. And we wanted to involve more people in that process than just us.

So, the day itself will kick off with some short presentations on the history of the project, and some of the interesting ways in which the data has been used, including a few surprise announcements.

The rest of the day will be more of a practical workshop, where we work together with attendees to look at different aspects of the project, and map out how it can be improved. To focus this down, we’ll be splitting into four different ‘teams’:

  • Group A will look at the information architecture and user interface of the website, answering difficult questions like how exactly do you browse thousands of different plaques, and what’s the best interface for allowing people to contribute?
  • Group B will look at the design of the website, thinking about an appropriate ‘look and feel’ and designing pages which allow for radically different amounts of content.
  • Group C will look at content, both in terms of identifying missing and incomplete data, and of working out ways to enrich the content so as to provide a context and understanding of the plaques.
  • Group D will look at development, tackling the technical side of things such as being able to manage more data, better, and supporting a wider range of users.

The registration form asks you to indicate which team you’d like to join. You don’t have to be an expert in any particular area, but we’d like you to contribute in whichever capacity you feel most comfortable.

We don’t envisage being able to solve all the problems in a single day, but we hope that with your help, we’ll at least be on the right path.

Finally, we’ll re-meet at the end of the day to talk through the work of the different groups, and to plot future progress.

What’s in it for you? Well hopefully you’re a fan of Open Plaques, and this is a perfect chance to get involved. It will also be a good opportunity to meet and collaborate with a bunch of interesting new people.

There’s room for about 30 or so people, so if you’re interested, let us know by registering now!

The event has been kindly funded by the RSA Catalyst fund. The RSA, incidentally, started the original blue plaque scheme in London, so it’s a fitting partnership! You can BOOK HERE.

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The AI Cookbook OCR plaque reading challenge

One of the purposes of Open Plaques is to provide an interesting geographical dataset that external projects can use licence free. We are trying a few projects before fully opening up the api, so please contact us if you have a good idea and want to use our data.

Ian Ozsvald, author of The AI Cookbook, has been experimenting with Optical Character Reading (OCR) of plaque photographs and has created a challenge for other AI hackers to advance the work.

Ian says, “the challenge aims to automatically read flickr images of plaques and then to use computer vision and optical character recognition tools to transcribe the text with human-level accuracy.”

“Currently I have a manual process which gives a human-like result (99% accuracy including spaces and punctuation errors). I’m working on an automated process: http://blog.aicookbook.com/2010/07/automatic-plaque-transcription-using-python-work-in-progress/

“I have a demonstration system written in Python: http://aicookbook.com/wiki/Automatic_plaque_transcription which can be started in 30 minutes by any Python coder (or converted to another language by a competent programmer). The demo downloads a set of 30 plaque images, passes them through the open source tesseract OCR tool and scores the resulting transcriptions.”

“Ultimately I’d like to have a system that can run inside an iPhone, transcribing plaques as they’re photographed and uploading the results into openplaques with little manual entry for the human to do. The bigger picture is to understand how humans read text in the real (messy!) world so we can create augmented reality applications on mobile devices – imagine if your phone could ‘read’ a poster in the street and augment the display with location, background, details and propose a calendar entry for you – all from pointing the device at text in the real world.”

“I’m looking for hackers to join me in this project, to that end I’m offering an Amazon voucher (£25 or equivalent value) as a monthly prize to anyone who has the best automatic, open source (with no human involvement!) transcription system. Hackers of all levels are welcome.”

Any AI hackers out there who are interested in participating should check the AI Cookbook Google Group and/or the AI Cookbook wiki

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Open Plaques Open Day event confirmed

Good news! We’ll be holding our Open Plaques Open Day event on Saturday 25th September 2010 in the Centre for Creative Collaboration (venue hashtag: #c4cc) at 16 Acton Street, London WC1X 9NG. If you’re interested in joining us, save the date! Located centrally just 5 minutes walk from Kings Cross station, bookings will open soon, but for now we’re focused on gathering in YOUR ideas and thoughts for the event’s areas of focus.

The Centre for Creative Collaboration is a groundbreaking space, being a pilot joint venture by the University of London, Goldsmiths, the Central School of Speech and Drama, Royal Holloway and Complexity Partners LLP.  Opened this year, it’s already got an impressive list of projects and events under it’s belt, including being host to the regular collaborative meet-up that is Tuttle Club, and other projects including the Live Media FLOSS Extended Production Seminary, the A Mad[s] Collective installation, DeriveLab, and the Prototype for A Spatialised Instrument. A full list is available on the Projects section of the C4CC website.

The space has wifi, and we’ll be occupying two of the multiple areas that comprise the building. It’s currently looking like we’ll have room for about 35-40 participants on the day – but of course the wider web community not physically present can also be involved. We’re hugely excited to be working with the C4CC to make this happen!

As our last post outlined, we’ve received backing from the RSA Catalyst fund to mount this event on the basis that it – and activity around it – advances the website’s (and any related mobile apps) ability to be more usable and take more contributions (adding unlisted plaques, biographical content, other media, etc) from the public at the front-end, and to better facilitate input more generally from the community of developers and other web specialists.

We’re happy to report we’ve started to have more people getting in touch and contributing suggestions for the site, for apps, and other ideas, but it’s still early days and now that the event is confirmed, we’d love to hear suggestions from anyone who has an interest in the Open Plaques project.

If you’re intrigued or inspired by the idea of gathering data (photos, biography, video, etc) on the historical markers that blue (and other) plaques commemorate, and making it available for public re-use – maybe even for a specific project you are working on yourself – let us know! And roll-on the 25th of September!

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