The Monster that Ate Canberra - Now in stunning 3D
The Monster that Ate Canberra - Now in stunning 3D
Well, that’s not entirely true, and we may be jumping the gun a little here, so lets take a step back….to 1980!
Shaun didn’t really want to go to Canberra, but this is how it happened…
This is the year that I started school in Canberra after moving here from Sydney, and it was in the Page Primary School library (Don’t bother looking for it - its now a housing estate) that I first discovered the book “The Monster That Ate Canberra” by an author by the name of Michael Salmon. I wont spoil the story, Ill save that for the assignment piece, but I will say that there was something about this ‘monster’ travelling around Canberra eating things that appealed to me. 
So, now we jump back to 2009 and the Networked Media Production unit that this blog is all about. My initial plan was to create a Data Visualisation, but for some unknown reason the whole idea of the Geo Narrative featuring Alexander Bunyip came to mind while I was googling the idea of Data Vis. From there it was all systems go. I made a blog post at the time and Id like to expand on this now…
Have we hit a barrier?
This is where my first problem arose. How do I present a well known children’s book without breaking any kind of copyright? Well, I took a chance and found Michael Salmon’s official website and decided to send Michael an Email. I gave Michael an overview of what I was planning to do with his work and asked him for his permission to use to work in the project and within hours I had an enthusiastic reply with his full approval and best wishes.
Within days he had also sent me a signed copy of the recent colour version of the book, an “Alexander Bunyip History File as well as several other books Michael had written and illustrated for my children. Barrier? No way José!
Pictures Pictures Everywhere … but not the ones I want!
I initially started placing all the ‘place marks’ in Google Maps and doing searches through Flickr for images that were able to be used under the “Creative Commons” license (And was disappointed to find that there weren’t a lot of photos available for the locations I was searching for. I still had the scans from the book to include, but I wanted to include some photographic references to the locations. What I eventually did was incorporate the two!
I took the original photographs that I had found in Flickr and created a bit of a Mash-Up in Photoshop to combine them with the images from the book (This technique was also used to some degree in the original 1972 publication of the book). Following the terms under the Creative Commons license I attributed the original photo to the artist and made links to their page on Flickr in the posts. Its done!
But I want something more, something better, something bigger!!!! I remembered seeing the 21 Steps Google Map from the site “We Tell Stories” and I liked the way that it had been represented. It had something ‘more’ to it than a simple map. Unfortunately it was something that with my level of experience I was unable to replicate.
So, the narrative had been added to the place marks, the photos had been incorporated, I had even gone as far as adding Wikipedia links for parts of the story so that the ‘geo narrative’ could also be used as ‘info-tainment’ but I just wasn’t as happy as I could have been with the ‘finished’ product. Google Maps worked well enough to show WHERE the story was taking place, but it needed something more, a certain level of interaction or a sense of ‘being there’. The Answer … Google Earth!
Just like being there - minus the expensive travel costs and risk of Swine Flu
There is something quite different to having a ‘birds eye view’ of the harbour bridge in Google Maps and having a stunning view of the harbour complete with 3D representations of “the coat hanger’ with the Opera House in the foreground. Its something very attention grabbing. My initial thoughts were that I wanted to really ‘show case’ the locations that Alexander was visiting, and Google Earth gave me this ability. It also gave me the opportunity to customise the ‘narrative bubbles’ using some basic HTML and include some custom graphics as headers. I didn’t like the way that Google Maps left the altitude that the locations were viewed from up to the reader, and Google Earth let me set ‘snapshot views’ with the locations view set at the point I liked and though best represented the narrative going on in the story.
And on the seventh day I rested, but then still wasn’t happy and started again.
It was complete! I had a Google Map that included custom graphics that I created for place marks. It had photos from others, graphics created as a mash-up and original content from the book. I had Google Earth with all its 3D goodness and I had my Tumblr account. What I also had was a link to my Google Map that included the God Forsaken “IFRAME” reference. I posted the Google Map link in Tumblr. It didn’t like it, so I tried Blogger, no luck there, Wordpress - again, the HTML Gods mocked me. I wasn’t happy! Every time I tried I got the link, but the Map itself would not show! What was I to do? So, I created a whole new page for it!
Wordpress Pages to the rescue!
Having used Wordpress for my first assignment, I was familiar with creating pages and this is what I had decided to do with this assignment. This would also give me more of an opportunity to present the whole project on a single page including instructions, links and photos to show off the undertaking. And that is where “The Monster That Ate Canberra” took shape.
It offers information and download links to Google Earth, links to the Authors page and also information on the Creative Commons licence. It was also handy to link to the kml file that you could download to view the map in Google Earth. So now, may I introduce
