Image Maps: Exploring Urban History through Digital Photography

This paper describes an integration of geographic information systems (GIS) and multimedia technologies to create opportunities for people to explore the history of their cities. We have augmented a digital camera with a global positioning system (GPS) and a digital compass to record its position and orientation when ordinary photographs are taken. The metadata are used to retrieve and present historical images of the photographed locations to photographers. Another set of tools allows students to annotate and compare these historical images to develop explanations of how and why their communities have changed over time. We describe the hardware and software architectures and learning outcomes that we expect to see in classroom use.