The brief for Arts on the Map was to visualise the geographic reach and impact of funding provided to Arts organisations by the Australia Council for the Arts. An initial dataset of nearly 200 hundred funded organisations was mapped according to artforms and regions. An additional level of user generated functionality was added enabling each of the organisations to login and edit and update their profiles, and contribute digital story content (youtube, vimeo, custom digital postcards) to the database.
Arts on the Map can be searched in a full screen map view (google maps or google earth) using a custom flash navigation overlay developed for the project. The default map view is Google Maps but some of the touring features are designed to take advantage of the Google Earth browser plug-in. Visitors can select one or more artform areas and one or more regions (state or territory) to refine their search of organiations. The ‘tour’ feature generates a custom KML of the search results to play an automated fly-around. A second navigation tab (Stories) enables digital story content searching and generates similar tours of published story content. The red kangaroos denote the location of arts organisation and white kangaroos show the location of stories published by these organisations.
Single image ‘digital postcard’ stories can be created and published from any email enabled mobile phone. Postcards created with GIS enabled phones are automatically located at the place the image was taken, providing a quick and simple way for organisations to send in updates about their activities from across Australia and internationally. The next stages of Arts on the Map will include support for Australia Council funded projects as well as exploring connections with other datasets made available through the Data Australia initiative.
We have created a user login for Mashup visitors to explore the user generated content features of Arts on the Map.
Username – MashupGuest
Password – MashupGuest
A PDF user guide and video is provided in the help menu.
Arts on the Map was developed by Feral Arts for the Australia Council for the Arts. It has been designed to integrate into the Australia Council’s website www.australiacouncil.gov.au but is hosted externally as part of Feral Arts’ PlaceStories system (www.placestories.com).
