The NYCDA Philadelphia community, encapsulating students, alumni, teachers, and teacher’s assistants based in the Greater Philadelphia area, is building an application to make use of specific datasets made available through Open Data Philly. This application would make use of the skills and technologies that students learn over the course of their 12-week Web Development Intensive program.
History Here - a History Channel application that displays the locations of historical significance around you via GPS location or a chosen location.
History Pin - an application to allow users to tell stories of their local history, and share pictures and stories.
An app that only displays historical locations fails to convey the emotional and human connection people have with them. Conversely, an app that serves to only pin mementos and images to each location fails to create a cohesive narrative. The historical “evidence” that users provide do not coalesce into a story that people can empathize and engage with.
Our objective for this app is twofold: The first is to allow users of this application to be able to dynamically visualize a given neighborhood, site, or establishment’s historical past, via verified data collected from historians and Open Data Philly, but also via testimony, photos, or anecdotal stories collected from local business owners and residents. The second is to enable users to contribute directly as civilian historians, so that their personal memoirs, stories, and memorabilia can be woven together to create a larger, richer, tableau depicting the location as the people who once worked, lived, and built their lives there experienced it.
Users can:
- create posts and upload photos
- rate other users’ posts on accuracy, usefulness, or level of interest
- request posts be removed if they deem them unsuitable for the site
- link resources to validate their posts
- earn badges or ranking for number of contributions
Administrators can:
- remove undesirable posts or users
- serve as safeguards against malicious trolling
The MVP will focus on Philadelphia and its neighborhoods, reflecting information provided in the following datasets:
Philadelphia Registered Historic Sites: https://www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/philadelphia-registered-historic-sites Now and Then, Modern and Historical Images of Philadelphia: https://www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/now-then-modern-and-historical-images-of-philadelphia