Digital Arts Service Corps - maps

2 Ways to Use Craigslist to Find a Cheap Place

Morgan Sully — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:42:10 +0000

So you've just signed up to live for a whole YEAR at poverty level AND you might have even been crazy enough to move to a new city to do this. You're (hopefully!) excited to start your work as a DASCorps member building the capacity of your organization.

But what if you haven't found a place to live yet? If you've just started your VISTA year in a new city, your housing should be a top priority. It's hard to do good work if you're constantly wondering where you're going to live.

In this post, I'll cover 5 tips/tools for rocking finding a place to live. Read on to begin the rocking.

1) craigslist

well duh. Craigslist is almost a given. For the uninitiated, craigslist is an awesome online classifieds service originally founded in San Francisco. It has since been replicated in major metropolitan cities around the world and is used by millions of people each day for finding housing, cars, romance and just about any other things humans can share with each other.

TIP: one of the most under utilized features of craiglist is their search-based RSS feed. *Setting one up is easy:

Click on the 'apts/housing' section (or whatever housing situation you are looking for) and enter in your search terms.
Click "Search"
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for the RSS link. You can either subscribe this link in your RSS reader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) or simply add it as a bookmark to your browser bookmark toolbar (see the image above for how it looks in Firefox 3 for the Mac).

*A more detailed tutorial of this process can be found on the Get Rich Slowly blog.

2) housingmaps.com

This one is sweet. Google maps + craigslist. If you've just moved to a new city, chances you are not really sure where everything is just yet. When you look for housing on craigslist, the names of the neighborhoods may be irrelevant to you because you don't know where these neighborhoods are in relation to you. Housingmaps.com fixes that.

It has the built in housing search/filtering of craigslist (price ranges, number of rooms, pictures, location) + the marker functionality of Google maps. These two put together allow you to filter the markers that appear on a map to fine tune your search.

Maybe you might get ideas for how Google maps could be used at your organization?

3) listpic

Yet another awesome way that craigslist is being used to help people find things. This lets you browse craigslist visually, so you can see what these places look like.

However, some things to consider: 1) it ONLY searches posts with an image. This may limit what comes up. 2) conversely, by showing ONLY the places with images, it COULD save you some time trekking to the place only to find that it's not agreeable to where you want to live during your VISTA year.

Speaking of trekking, you DID ask your org if they could help out with public transportation, right? We at the Transmission Project encourage you to ask your org about any resources you may need during your year. Living on the meager stipend that AmeriCorps mandates can be tough. Don't make it any harder on yourself by getting burned out trekking across town to run errands, look for housing, let alone get to work.

Teen Digital Storymapping Workshop in Lower Roxbury

danielle martin — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 12:58:12 +0000

I just finished a digital storytelling and mapping workshop that included over 10 youth who stayed creative and excited to share their stories even in 90 degree heat without AC! It's a project I've been working on pretty much since the beginning of this VISTA year, by meeting with folks from the Lower Roxbury Empowerment Coalition, a group of housing developments and non-profit programs who are trying to create inter-neighborhood partnerships and tap into Northeastern University outreach programs. Jayme Bonds, who works tirelessly at Mandela Homes, participated in one of my train-the-trainers this spring and got pretty adamant about me working with youth leaders from her summer programs. We decided to open it up to as many local housing development summer programs as we could get together, and it worked out well. We even got a couple participants from Worcester!

I gathered some MassIMPACT folks and got Colleen Kelly, now former CTC VISTA and employee at Emerson College, to come help facilitate. The group of youth were all girls except for one, well spoken young man George, who all had interesting and personal stories to share. It was a big group for a digital storytelling workshop (over 15 folks working on stories at once) but it worked out fine to split the group into two story circles and we had enough experienced storytellers floating around to help with the one-on-one support. Several of the youth also really excelled at the technical side, so they were finished with their stories by the beginning of the third day. So we had them publish their stories on StoriesForChange.net and help build the Google Map...and then show others how to do it as well. We're hoping to do a few follow-up two-hour workshops over the summer to help support these youth in their quest to teach digital storytelling to other younger residents.

I also owe big thanks to Royal and Paulette at Camfield Estates for hosting, and for Jayme Bonds from Mandela Homes for providing the food. The final stories are posted at StoriesforChange.net http://storiesforchange.net/event/teen_digital_storymapping_bootcamp and all linked off the Google Map at http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=1015076548696853...
There's also more photos on Flickr.

Community Map-builder

Matthew Isaacs — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 19:27:38 +0000

I can across an application that allows for community built apps. I'm considering its appropriateness for some of the mapping functionality for CUWiN.

http://communitymapbuilder.org/display/MAP/Home

The museum might not have walls, but it's got some stories...

danielle martin — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 20:35:02 +0000

When people ask me (as they inevitably do when they find out I'm a full time volunteer) why I do VISTA, I often cite the ways it connects me to groups and people that I could have never imagined I could meet doing a regular job. In fact, my work this year doing digital storytelling facilitation and other related projects for MassIMPACT came out of meeting Natasha Friedus (of Creative Narrations) at UMass Boston and getting myself invited to her second Spreading the Stories train-the-trainer workshop last year. And so it was how I ended up at the MIT Museum this past week, working with able fellow facilitator Lisa Dush of Story Builders, UMass Amherst, and MIT in the fall. We were asked by Cesar McDowell of MIT's Center for Reflective Community Practice to help out with the new Museum Without Walls project.

Museum Without Walls (MWOW) is an interesting approach to bringing the museum experience out of the museum, approaching the entire MIT campus like a potential historical and personal tour and reflection space. Using adapted video players with WIFI access and GPS, the project aspires to have visitors walk the campus and access a rich library of video and still content based on their physical location by 2011. Since it's MIT, the gadgets will certainly be innovative and the stories unique, but the interdisciplinary idea of museum content that could change as users add and walk around with it piqued my personal interest in placed based storytelling.

Our small digital storytelling workshop was billed not only as a pilot to create MIT place based stories, but as a Independent Activities Period (IAP) offering. (I learned later through one of the stories that this is a way for MIT students and staff to explore small subject explorations in the time between fall and spring semesters.) We set up a workspace in a long exhibit space, so that our story circle and laptop workspaces were surrounded by antique single lensed microscopes. In fact, this full immersion in the to Museum became a quiet theme to the week, where we were invited into the archives to find images and I passed by Harold Edgerton photos and holographs on my way to the bathroom.

Our host Otto Loggers gathered a group of graduate students from the HASTS (History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology & Society), Urban Planning, and Biology programs, sprinkled in with a staff from the Alumni office. In the beginning, Lisa and I were curious on how we could balance the desire to include historical references and facts with authentic narratives usually characterized in digital stories. The fear is always that participants will lean toward professional, objective tales and away from more personal stories, but this group also had the challenge of being the pilot stories in the MWOW project. We decided to go with the flow and see where the participants' stories and group's dynamics took us.

I'm glad to report that the group came together well, still bringing a myriad of tones, purposes, and expressions. While one PhD student mused why MIT isn't more focused on environmental sustainability, another detailed her participation on huge, puzzle riddled annual Mystery Hunt. Another student candidly discussed her emotions around being an Iranian student at MIT and shared a table with fellow HAST student who hysterically chronicled her initial days of getting hopelessly lost in the maze of MIT's buildings. One story even connected MIT to Lawrence and Lowell through past funders and current initiatives. Even the stories about alumni and IAP featured personal touches such as famous crimson red jacket and a "borrowed" sign warning of laser beams. (As soon at the stories come out of post-production and the MWOW folks figure out next steps of getting the pieces online, I'll include a link here.)

The usual stress of learning a new form of expression coupled with new technologies was a bit increased when we learned that most of the participants were Mac folks and we were confined to the Windows laptops we were able to procure. But I always make the argument that the stories can be made with even the most rudimentary tools and keeping it simple never hurts. So even when Windows Movie Maker crashed and the participants started to perfect the Day 3 hunch over their machines, I told them to be patient, stretch and take breaks, and save often (Ctrl S is your friend). In three days, they not only made seven 3-5 minutes long digital stories, Lisa introduced the group to audio editing in Audacity and we managed to scan quite a few photos and artifacts for both the stories and the Museum's digital archives as well.

In a stroke of luck, we invited the Museum staff that had opened the doors for us or researched our topics in the archives to come see the finished pieces. I say this was lucky because they were such a gracious and appreciative audience - especially friend Adam Holt who's excited about the possibilities of this project to combine digital storytelling and mapping. These staff had seen us around the last three days, but they had no idea that we were working on such "gems" of MIT's history funneled through personal experience. After a frazzled afternoon of harried video editing, these compliments soothed our storytellers and got them thinking about how they could take digital storytelling back to their departments and projects as the next semester begins this week.

This workshop was a good break for me from working with youth or community organizers, strictly because the mind sets seemed so different. MIT students seem strangely focused on their individual studies and programs yet still connected with so many aspects of the world and the environment. By throwing a personal narrative process into this mix, Lisa and I created a space that yielded new challenges and benefits for me as a facilitator. The juxtaposition of the microscopic and global mind sets created a compelling challenge as we revised the stories based on the perceived audience and intended point of view. And the idea that personal reflection should be tempered with historical and archival facts and context both limited and expanded the impact of each story differently.

The next step is determining how I can bring this new both PLACE and HISTORICAL mind set into the next set of train-the-trainer workshops I'm trying to do this spring with housing developments and community organizations in Boston and Springfield.

[Also blogged at VerdeSmoke.com]

Community Wireless Maps

Matthew Isaacs — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 22:48:36 +0000

One of my more recent projects has been re-working the network map for the local community wireless network. My efforts thus far can be found at http://map2.cuwireless.net. Credit for the CSS and the text accompanying the map goes to Ross. This is just the first part. The next stage is to add an admin/management interface.

The map is powered by PHP and the Google Maps API (which uses javascript). The Google Maps API is incredibly easy to use and has lots of features.

For anyway who is interested, this little project will be distilled into an open-source package once it is complete (should be sometime this month).