Hi everyone,
The BFI's Britain on Film was a project to digitise 10,000 archive films from the BFI National Archive and the UK's regional and national film archives, and make those available online for free. Additionally, the project aimed to geotag the films and create a web interface to let users navigate and search by geolocation. You can see that interface on the BFIPlayer:https://player.bfi.org.uk/britain-on-film/map
Since that project completed that first phase, we have been working on a crowdsourcing platform, to let users add pins to the map at scene level (previously we addressed entire film level only), and go deeper (previously we stopped at the Ordnance Survey's town / village / settlement level, not going down to street).
That platform has taken quite a while to develop - turns out it's quite complex to make an easy-to-use application to define a scene in a film, find a place on a map, drop a pin, and continue with more scenes. I guess to some of you more used to web application development than I am, that would be easy, or it would be obvious that it's hard. But for me it was a lesson learned about how difficult it is to make a complex thing feel simple to a user in an interface.
But, in any case, it's now live, at https://contribute.bfi.org.uk/
It was built by SciFabric, using their Pybossa platform that's no doubt known to many of you from the British Museum's amazing MicroPasts project: https://crowdsourced.micropasts.org/. Thanks to Daniel Pett and Chiara Bonacchi for twigging me to Pybossa at a MicroPasts event.
And finally, in case it's of interest, I wrote a blog back in 2015 about how we used Ordnance Survey open data to build the geolocation infrastructure that underpinned the project: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/blog/2015/07/mapping-britain-on-film-with-os-opendata/ Would probably do things differently now but that was then, and it worked out.
Cheers,
Stephen McConnachie,
Head of Data and Digital Preservation, BFI
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