Posts filed under 'Place Sites'
If you ever walked along a historic railroad and looked around, you might notice artifacts from an earlier time: abandoned telegraph poles, mechanical signals, and perhaps a watering station if you were lucky. Looking out further you see clusters of settlements, industries, and businesses that located next to the strategic iron highway. A walk along the railroad is an opportunity to perceive and understand our economic and social history through the built form. Some artifacts speak to our current setting: abandoned siding tracks, litter, and backwater houses.
Naomi Adiv, a doctoral student from U.C. Davis, is comprehensively documenting elements and their perceived meanings along the 170 mile Capitol Corridor from San Jose to Oakland, Sacramento, and Auburn, California for her dissertation. Reading just a little bit of her blog has resonated with my fascination of the railroad and formation on the landscape.
photo by compujeramey
March 6th, 2008
Like Turn Here (amateur videos documenting places), Placeblogger is about celebrating the unique experiences that characterize places. By juxtaposing all of the blogs about a particular place, a real-time, real-life, word-of-mouth portrait of that place is created that could potentially capture a place in a way that major newspapers or travel guides can’t.
“Placeblogs are about something broader than news alone. They’re about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn’t news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people.”
Naturally, my first impulse was to look up cities in which I’ve lived. Although right now most of the places are major metro areas, I was surprised to see at least one entry for a town near my hometown, Kittanning, PA. I don’t know how many blogs would actually be devoted to writing about a small town like Kittanning, however.
But another way to explore places via blogs, perhaps, would be to look up shared locations on Social Networking sites like Xanga. Although Xanga recommends that you only identify yourself with the larger Metro area, Seth managed to get a pretty decent metro going for Fredericktown, Ohio, the 2300-person town where he grew up… http://metros.xanga.com/metros/metro.aspx?id=7551
LINK: http://www.placeblogger.com/faq
January 18th, 2007
The AIGA (professional organization for graphic arts/design) started a project encouraging people to “document democracy” and particularly the “interiors, exteriors and other views that are part of your voting experience.”
The goal of the project is to document the good and bad aspects of the voting experience, to celebrate it and to consider how it could be improved.
I should have posted sooner when you could have submitted something, but here’s a link to check out the submissions. And you’re always welcome to post your thoughts here.
LINK: http://www.pollingplacephotoproject.org/
Food for Thought: What aspects of your voting environment affected your experience? Your sense of privacy? Your confidence that your vote went through?
November 7th, 2006