Politicians like to refer to Main Street. But what actually is Main Street? Is it one people, one place, as political discourse often seems to suggest? Actually, in the US, there are more than 10,000 streets called Main Street… This video is about a documentary using Vimeo and Flickr, and archiving & presenting those streets using crowdsourcing. Not mentioned (I think) are the possibilities for Augmented Reality (AR): just imagine having all those documents available in layers one could display on the physical reality, layers which could be further annotated… (I mentioned this project in the Google Wave “AR Wave: Use Cases”).
This project, mappingmainstreet.org, is not just a play-thing for new media enthusiasts. As explained during the meeting, it makes communities ask questions about the representations of what they are doing and not doing. The whole project is also inspired by the work of Bruno Latour who says very interesting things about the crisis of representation (Bruno Latour is also mentioned in the Moodle forums of the CCK09 course, as being one of the developers of the actor-network theory).
Here is the video:
Roland Legrand