Needed feature: Location correction

[Translucence]

Hi, I think it's been raised before but a much needed feature is the ability for other users to submit a "correction" for the locations other people have pinned their pictures.

I'm not sure if you guys have used Google Maps much, but logged-in users can click on the marker for a shop/location/etc and select "move marker" which gives them a graphical interface - a map - on which they can select what they think is the correct location for the item.

It would be great if Historypin had this feature.

Obviously it would submit the location to HistoryPin staff for approval

... OR ... maybe you could leverage the users and have some section where they go to approve other people's changes, with X number of users required to approve before the location is changed, and you can't approve your own. It would be very similar to the "GeekMod" approval system on the well-known site BoardGameGeek.com which has been using that concept for many years.

There are three problems with people pinning pictures, and I think that people making an honest mistake is the least of these problems.

Most organisations that I've seen add pictures to Historypin just dump them in one pile on the one spot - like 65 pictures. They don't have the time or interest to place the pictures in their correct locations. That's a shame, especially when other people might be keen to place them.

Other people seem to just randomly drop pictures anywhere on the map. Buildings in the wrong suburb, the wrong city, even the wrong *hemisphere*.

I hope that you're still considering suggestions. :-)

[Jon Voss]

Hi @translucence,

We agree, this is a feature we should have, and it's something we've been experimenting with.  A couple of things have had to happen to make this useful at all over the last year or so.  The first is that users will get notified when someone suggests a change, comments on, or favorites something on their Channel.  For instance, I just favorited one of the theatres you've pinned on Bridge Road, so you should get an email notification about that.

Now for the metadata corrections, please take a look at http://yearofthebay.org to see what we're experimenting with here.  First of all, you'll notice a mysteries tab, which gives administrators of Projects the ability to create mysteries that need solving, according to specific metadata fields like Street View, Date, etc.  Have a look and see what you think, and give it a try, we'd love your feedback. 

The other thing you'll notice is that you can go to any content on the Year of the Bay Project and suggest more accurate details directly.  For instance, you can go to this photo, click on Suggest More Accurate Details, and then choose Street View on the drop down box (if you're logged in) and you'll have an option to suggest a Street View.  Give it a try and let us know what you think.  We're thinking of enabling this on the site 

We're also starting to do testing on some big updates to Historypin this summer and would love to do user interaction testing with anyone that's interested.  Everyone: please let me know if you'd be interested in doing a remote session with one of our researchers for 30-60minutes.

Thanks,

Jon

Jon Voss
Historypin Strategic Partnerships Director
ph. 415-935-4701

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[Translucence]

Yeah, I was briefly excited when I got the "favourite". I find there's zero sense of community on HistoryPin and I think that massively sabotages the success of the site, and why I only drift back once a year. I've got no way of telling whether there are other people actively using the site in my area and so it feels like it's dead. This is odd because at the moment here in Melbourne, Australia we have a massive surge in Facebook pages for old history photos, many with daily updates and public exhibitions, but no one ever mentions Historypin :-(

Yes that "suggest more accurate details" looks good.

I'm guessing you're still getting the corrections reviewed by Historypin staff members rather than crowd-sourcing it as per my suggestion?
I figure you guys get snowed-under with work since I've reported some very wrong pins ages ago and they're still there (increasing the feel that the site is dead)

I've always felt that there is *so* much potential for this site, that's why I'm still stubbornly hanging around. :-)

Fingers crossed for the big updates! :-)

[Jon Voss]

I appreciate your eternal optimism. Would be amazing to tap into the community history FB craze, as you mention, and we've got some thoughts on that, but also want to make sure it would meet and add to our social aims.  We're open to ideas.  Sometimes it takes a community organizer to be a bridge between those conversations on Facebook and an account on Historypin, which we've seen happen in a few places. 

No, you guess wrong, that's crowdsourcing in the sense that the content owner is alerted to a suggestion, and others can contribute to the conversation or suggest other locations. This is an attempt to facilitate more direct communication, but like many things on our site, it's a work in progress.  We used to have to (try) and respond to individual suggestions, but that obviously didn't scale and removed that option some time ago.  

Thanks for your continued support, and we'll see you next year. 

Jon

[Translucence]

*smirk* okay then ;-)

Hmm so the current policy is that it's up to the original person who pinned the picture to make the correction when the suggestion comes through?
That only works for what I suggested was the most minor of the "wrong place" pins - when someone serious has made an honest mistake and is still around to make the change.

Most Historypin channels I've visited have not had any activity for a long time, they're probably no longer interested in making changes.

One school group I know has an account on Historypin and has an exercise where students have to pin something on the site. Many of the students aren't particularly interested and lots of random pictures appear at incorrect locations, with titles like "a house" or "old building" and the some images appear multiple times. I would love to be able to tidy up that mess, but since the account owner isn't interested in tidying up, nothing can be done.

Chris

[Jon Voss]

Yes, they just have to approve the changes.  It does rely on their receiving an email to know someone suggested a change, which also requires that they have an email on record.  The hope is this is the kind of thing that would help bring people back to their collections. 

Ping me on the specific Channel you're looking at offline and let's see if we can sort something out on that one. 

Thanks, Jon

[James Morley]

Interesting discussion.

A useful thing would be if this was added to a user's 'dashboard' (by
this I guess I mean something like the statistics tab in the Tool Bar,
or maybe even an alert symbol in the top level navigation bar). Plus
of course a regular (weekly?) email reminder that there are
outstanding suggestions.

Cheers, James

---
James Morley
www.jamesmorley.net / @jamesinealing
www.whatsthatpicture.com / @PhotosOfThePast

[Association Of Tribal Archives, Libraries And Museums]

I am not a member if this group and have tried to unsubscribe. The message bounces back because I am not a member. How do I get off the list? It isn't that I'm not interested in your work, I'm must inundated with emails.

Susan Feller
405-401-8293 (cell)
405-522-3259 (office)

[Vahur Puik]

What Chris is suggesting is the approach we have for our platform Ajapaik.ee.

We are piloting it with historic images from Estonian (EU) memory institutions (we currently have access to the API of muis.ee).

All the geotagging is done in a crowdsourced (and also gamified) manner, i.e. the users get shown pictures (from a chosen city) and they can decide whether they know where the picture was taken from and try to pin it on the map or skip the image. For each image we calculate the trustworthiness of the location (geotag) based on the number of suggestions made and how much do suggestions made by different users coincide. Very important is also the trustworthiness of the user making the suggestion (which in turn is calculated from the history of the user's suggestions -- how do they coincide with suggestions made by other users etc), so a suggestion made by a trusted user has more weight than that made by a newbie.

So far the system has proven very reliable. Roughly 2/3 of the images get geotagged very nicely, 1/3 is the more difficult cases that need more complex algorithms..

Our idea is to really focus on crowdsourced geotagging of historic photographs, to make it reliable and efficient for big amounts of images without the need of the owner of the images to approve suggestions.

With best,

Vahur Puik

Ajapaik.ee

[robin aka georgiawebgurl]

This is similar to how facebook makes corrections, too. The Places Editor community which consists of volunteers (like me) work through the geographic problems that Facebook has identified for us. I usually will go through a burst of them in the evening when I need something to do for fun (what can I say, I like metadata... ) Once I submit a change (merge/edit/deletion/etc) or confirm that it is correct (or skip because I do not read the language), it goes into the queue. I'm not exactly sure of the detailed process, but it does depend upon other Place Editors confirming my suggestions or in some cases, I am most likely confirming someone else's changes. 

Another option might be to take a cue from the DPLA: they are using community members as advocates. I think you could do this for metadata editing as well. Library & Info Science students are always looking for projects - especially those in cataloging. It is very hard to find any sort of metadata work to do as an internship, if you do not already have a partnership with a particular library. They would be a great group to approach. 

Having worked with historical photographs for a large digital library in academia, I do know that this won't work for EVERY problem. Some photographs will not have info to make an accurate identification. However, it does seem that crowdsourcing metadata can work for the majority of issues.  

 

Robin Fay @georgiawebgurl

Portal Manager

ATCx3 

http://contentdivergent.blogspot.com

[Jon Voss]

Great thoughts here Robin! I had no idea Facebook had a locations community. Would love to be able to collectively start comparing different kinds of user interfaces for this kind of work that are currently available and how they're being used.  We've certainly looked at a lot of them over the years. 

Love your ideas on models for managers or advocates too. 

Thanks! Jon

+ + +

Sent from mobile device

[James Morley]

Hi all

Doing that comparison - looking at not just the UX side of all the
interfaces but also the community and workflow aspects, then ranking
this against productivity/accuracy - would be a fantastic project.

I've dabbled with this with both my Flickr Commons Tagr
(http://www.whatsthatpicture.com/flickr/commons/) and GathrIt
prototype (http://gathr.it/latest/) and the biggest lesson learnt is
that if someone could build an engaging, efficient tool for this kind
of work it would be massively popular and fanstastically valuable! I'm
also intrigued by the potential to use existing communities/services
outside of the immediate sector and the scale that this might bring.

Cheers, James

---
James Morley
www.jamesmorley.net / @jamesinealing
www.whatsthatpicture.com / @PhotosOfThePast