Eye on the sidebar: related photos from Flickr

In September, Tom Elliott blogged about our effort to get users of the Flickr photo sharing site to tag their photos of ancient sites or objects so that we could discover them and connect them to our graph of ancient world resources. It has been a success: over 2000 Flickr photos now carry Pleiades tags. On an individual Flickr photo page like the one for Dan Diffendale's Memento mori, you will see the tags shown near the bottom of the right sidebar.

Again, that's a screenshot from Flickr, not to be confused with following screenshots from Pleiades. Dan is asserting there that his photo is related to the Pleiades place Veretum/Baris and that the object's findspot is the same place. This findspot relationship, by the way, comes from a previous collaboration between ISAW and King's College, London; we enjoy seeing the Concordia project funded jointly by the NEH and JISC continue to bear fruit years later. We also enjoy the extra love that Flickr is giving us by the use of our Pleiades icon and a label that incorporates place titles taken directly from Pleiades.

Flickr hosts a number of photo finding services. We are using the pleiades machine tags with the services to find and show photos related to places in a "Flickr Photos" section at the bottom right of every place page. For example, the page about El Kab is illustrated by Iris Fernandez's photo of its 18th Dynasty tombs.

This portrait photo is fetched from a Flickr photo pool named Pleiades Places and is always one that bears a pleiades:depicts= machine tag, meaning that the photo depicts the site of the ancient place. The related photos reached by the link under the portrait are not restricted to that pool or that specific tag, they could be from any Flickr user and bear any pleiades machine tag that matches the shortname of the place (pleiades:*=440947682 in the case of El Kab).

Many places do not yet have any related photos. Most places do not yet have a portrait photo. Pleiades tags you add to your own photos will be almost immediately reflected in the Pleiades site (there's a lot of caching in our infrastructure, so you may have to shift-reload the page). You can also leave comments on photos of others suggesting the use of Pleiades machine tags. We're having success with such comment already. If you find a photo that's good enough to be a portrait for a place and you are a member of the Pleiades Places group on Flickr, you can suggest use of the pleiades:depicts tag and invite the photo's owner to add it to the Pleiades Places group. We're having success with these invitations, too.

If you'd like to see the number of related Flickr photos grow, please spread the word.

Acknowledgements

The idea of Flickr tags in a Pleiades namespace came from Daniel Pett and Ryan Baumann. Daniel Bogan of Flickr is bringing us the "extra love", something that seems to have originated with Aaron Straup Cope.