Sophie Drake and Andrew Page won our Heritage & History award (£300) at Hacked 2.1 for their work bringing Bath’s plaques to life with timelined photos.
What did you make?
We created a variety of ways of looking back into the history of Bath. This consists of 3 parts, a timeline of the events and people commentated in plaques around the city, old maps overlaid on the current plan of the city and historic photos from books related with Bath.
Which data sources/tools did you use?
We used the plans of Bath as prepared by the hack data curation team. Google maps and API is used to display them. Also the open plaque data is as held in the data store and originally sourced from openplaques.org to which we added specific dates for each plaque. The site is created in flask and uses Timeline.JS all additional data manipulation and additional programming was performed in python.
What were the challenges ?
Both of the team took on new technical areas which considering the opening advice was to stick around your existing skills we can’t complain about any challenges we had.
What would you do to improve your project further?
Left to right: Andrew Page, Tatjana Humphries (on behalf of Bath Digital) and Sophie Drake
Completing the links to people mentioned in the plaques and getting all the maps as well aligned as the 1891 one, would be first steps.
Then the original vision was to bring the 3 elements together to display map, plaque and picture data together.
The site is live at historybath.herokuapp.com