A Map of Our Own:Kwun Tong Culture and Histories
Kwun Tong is about to go through urban renewal plan in the near future. A group of people who care enough about the area build an online sanctuaryA Map Of Our Own – Kwun Tong Culture and Histories and employ digital technology to capture the moments before they past. The content is released under Creative Commons licenses, which can eliminate copyright hassles in preserving the materials. Moreover, Creative Commons licences encourage sharing, reuse and remix. Here is a message from one of the contributors, Anson Mak:
dear friends,
we are happy to soft-launch this project — A Map Of Our Own – Kwun Tong Culture and Histories. we have been working on it for 2 years and will go on for another 12 years.
as some of you may know, Kwun Tong town centre will experience the largest urban renewal plan in Hong Kong. 2 years ago, i thought, it might be good to have an interactive web site, that are of moving image, photography and sound creative works, while our sister blog, “living in kwuntong” (http://kwuntong.wordpress.com) is a text-based informative site. now, after months of effort, it’s time to share with you all.
briefly, this project is a database driven website, a participatory, interactive and locative archive on Kwun Tong culture. it supports multiple contributors and various types of media works (sound, still
image and moving image). visitors can interact with this archive in various ways including search on map/time-line/categories; sharing of media works in other web 2.0 platforms; audio-visual mix and rendering of itineraries for Kwun Tong walk.
if you are not familiar with multi-trajectories and non-linearity of interactive web site, here is a visitors guide for your reference. http://www.kwuntongculture.hk/en/home.php?op=about#5
i have two roles in this project — project director and one of the contributors. here is a brief writing i did as the project director, regarding idea and practice of this project.
http://www.kwuntongculture.hk/en/home.php?op=about#2
as a contributor, i have 64 posts/works on the web site. and until today, there are 125 works from 16 contributors. we will go on upload creative media works especially before the town centre is gone.
this is an open platform and how the site will become depends on the ways contributors use it.
moreover, we definitely welcome others who are interested in Kwun Tong culture and history. if you are interested to join us, pls let me know.
furthermore, we use hong kong creative commons license for authorization of copyrights and distribution of media works. we hope this project can also serves as an experiment of allowing others to use some of our works tagged by share-alike license for creative works.
we are still re-working on the design of the archive page… and more refinements are coming… and our work continues…
please spread the news, leave messages at individual posts’ comment field, or write to me directly on any suggestion and comment.
thanks very much.
best,
anson
