How to Digital Document a Trip Along the Oregon Trail?

April 4, 2008 10:06 AM

Cool, 2.0ish ways to document a trip along the Oregon Trail? I'll have a camera, a handheld GPS, a laptop, and an 8-year-old.

In June my son and I will be taking a two week trip along the length of the Oregon Trail from Missouri to Oregon. I am a historian of the American West and I have been wanting to do this for years. I have also been playing around with digital history and I want to make the trip into an experiment in using digital technology and web applications to tell a story. I will have a laptop, various cameras, and a handheld GPS unit. I could also buy additional toys as needed. We will mix hotels with camping and I will probably not have internet access every day.

At a minimum I want to put selected photos, writing, and perhaps video online. It would be nice if this was in some sort of sequential format, maybe laid out on a map of the trail. And yet I don’t want to spend a ton of time processing this—I am hoping for something that I can do quickly, spending no more than an hour a night to document the days adventures. I have a Blogger blog devoted to Northwest History and technology, My preference is to use that, or at least build from it.

What are my options? In addition to blogging I have played around a little with putting photos in my Picassa Albums into Google Maps and that is fun and fairly easy. I bought a program named Robogeo that is supposed to automatically geotag my photos (you sync the clocks on your camera and GPS unit and feed the data into the program) but can’t get it to work, perhaps because it doesn’t seem to play nice with Magellan products. Right now my plan is to put my best photos into a Picassa Web album, map them, and write a blog entry each day. But I am open to suggestions.

(And I promise to either link whatever I do back here or post it in Projects.)

posted by LarryC to technology (12 comments total)

8 year old cam. Give the kid a camera and tell him to take pictures of stuff he thinks is interesting.
posted by doctor_negative at 10:33 AM on April 4, 2008

He will love that! What else?
posted by LarryC at 10:42 AM on April 4, 2008

I'd consider capturing audio and video as well, opportunistically. Not in an attempt to document the whole trip, but just to have those elements to work with should I later decide I wanted my media to be a bit more multi, as it were. Probably more audio than video, but still... there are going to be some golden moments with your 8 year old that'll be worth videoing, I'm sure, if only the camping portions and the bits where you're talking about the original experience of those making the westward journey. How much you want to include the official project and how much you keep back just for family memories is up to you, but good heavens, this is seminal formative boys-own-trip-with-dad stuff, and it oughta be recorded with at least one eye to the personal in addition to the academic. Ambient audio can be awfully evocative, too.

I think my advice is essentially this: as an experiment in digital storytelling, there will presumably be two or three or more iterations of this tale. There's the one you will be telling in near realtime, uploading photos and blog entries when you find a convenient open node along the way. Then there's the version that will exist once the journey's done and you have had the time to go back and editorially, curatorially polish the thing to your liking. And THEN there's the version that you create some time later, either because you want to do something interesting and new with the data, or because your hosting environment is changing (say you decide that blogger sucks and you want to host your blog somewhere else, where you have more control) and you have to adapt your content to a new medium, etc. You're going to be telling this tale quite a few times, so it's probably best to think in terms of collecting material that will feed the project not only in the now, but later on. Thus audio and video, which you can edit once off the trail, ephemera which you can scan, weird things that kids do like collecting an acorn or something from every stop along the way to later assemble in a wunderkammer, which you can then photograph. Future proof it from yourself.

Also, doctor_negative's answer is good, but I advise against giving out Best Answer checks just yet... lots of folks will see the check on the AskMe index and move on by, thinking your problem has been solved. Your problem isn't really solved until you get as many suggestions as you can handle and don't say "what else?"
posted by mumkin at 10:49 AM on April 4, 2008

Oh, and this isn't technical, really, but content-wise I would suggest that you consider focusing on food at least a little bit. It's a great way to connect people to history at, literally, a gut-instinct level. Make sure you have dietary data for the average traveler, and eat that for at least one whole day. It'll be interesting to compare and contrast against your modern diet, particularly given the much reduced caloric demands you'll have (I assume) since you won't be driving a team of oxen pulling a Conestoga wagon, fording rivers and the like.
posted by mumkin at 10:54 AM on April 4, 2008

I just hope, pray, and advise that you present the photos/information/narrative in the style of MECC's classic The Oregon Trail.
posted by 1 at 11:13 AM on April 4, 2008

It would be really, really great if you could package the resulting pile of digital Oregon Trail coolness into something akin to an homage/parody of the classic Oregon Trail game. (You ought to at least make use of some screenshots or something.) I know I'm probably not the only one who wants to make a "Game is getting scarce..." reference, am I?
posted by caution live frogs at 11:15 AM on April 4, 2008

Can you dig up any old settler-period photos taken on the Oregan Trail, and retake those same shots today?
posted by -harlequin- at 11:30 AM on April 4, 2008

I really like the idea of mapping your photos to your location.

Here's an overview from O'Reily. The idea is to make viewable GPS track of your trip with a clickable ste of pictures on it. Makes a really nice map-photoalbum of your trip.

I use the GPS-
Photo link software from Geospatial Experts to do this. They sell camera/GPS kits, but all you need is both a camera and a gps that can download to a computer. The software alone isn't terribly expensive. GPS-Photolink outputs an html package that contains both a map of where you've been, a track of your trip and little icons of each picture. During the import process, you can edit in titles and text comments for each picture also.

Setup is easy: at the beginning of the trip, you to synch the camera to the GPS time. The sorftware does the rest. One of the cool features of this software is that it remembers what direction you were last moving in and assumes that the picture is taken facing in that direction (you can also change this later in the software). You can give a camera to your kid and let him go wild for the whole week and let the camera figure out what he was looking at.

I really like this particular software, but there others on the market (see the O'Reily link). I think this is the sort of thing an 8-year-old could really get into.
posted by bonehead at 11:42 AM on April 4, 2008

an homage/parody of the classic Oregon Trail game

Yes, if nothing else there needs to be at least one picture of the two of you wearing this t-shirt.
posted by mumkin at 11:49 AM on April 4, 2008

Ask your son to help you make up a list of provisions. But please don't stop off to shoot at things if he's off!
posted by acoutu at 12:02 AM on April 5, 2008

Alas, the trip never took place, we have too much else going on this summer! Thanks for all the advice, though, it will come in handy on future trips.
posted by LarryC at 10:16 AM on July 16, 2008

Hey--the trip is back on! My '71 VW camper broke down on the way out west so I left it with a VW mechanic in Kansas City. Next week I will fly back to get it and follow the Oregon Trail. My 9-year-old is in school, but my 25-year-old is coming with me for the adventure. Stay tuned.
posted by LarryC at 2:35 PM on September 28, 2008