Comments on: Harvesting context #1: Flickr comments

By: Larry Cebula

Larry Cebula — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:56:02 +0000

Edit: Ooops, make that “the only LIMIT to its usefulness…”

By: Larry Cebula

Larry Cebula — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:55:23 +0000

This is a neat trick, the only to its usefulness is the quality of the Flickr comments–which is, shall we say, uneven. For example your first “Try It!” link goes to an Australian National Archives photo titled “Natural Disasters- Dust Storm at Broken Hill.” By installing Greasemonkey and your script the user is now able to read the comment from SandyEm: “Whaohhh massive! Hate to clean up after that! Great snap for the time.”

On the other had the second example has produced a modern Google Street view of the historic building in the photo, and a link to a story about an alleged haunting in that building, so there is some useful metadata there.

There is much giddyness about the Flickr partnership with various archives but until the Flickr software allows comments and annotations to be rated for usefulness, there is always going to be more wheat than chaff in the comments.

I posted about the problem on my blog, see: “Lick This”: LOC, Flickr, and the Limits of Crowd Sourcing: http://northwesthistory.blogspot.com/2009/06/lick-this-loc-flickr-and-limits-of.html

By: tim

tim — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:20:13 +0000

Too easy! How about:

} else if (document.location.href.match(/digitalgallery.nypl.org\/nypldigital\/dgkeysearchdetail\.cfm/i)) {
this.name = ‘NYPL’;
this.identifier = document.location.href.match(/imageID=(\d+)/i)[1];
this.flickrId = ‘32951986@N05′;
this.position = ‘#metadata’;
}

By: Mark A. Matienzo

Mark A. Matienzo — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 05:11:06 +0000

Hi Tim, I’m inclined to try hammering on your Greasemonkey script to pull comments from NYPL’s Digital Gallery images that also happen to be Flickr. I’ll let you know if I get anywhere; if you don’t hear from me, feel free to get a jump on it and let me know!

By: tim

tim — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:49:28 +0000

Andrew, if you have Greasemonkey installed, then all you have to do is go to the userscript page – http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/56135 – and click on ‘Install’.

By: Andrew G

Andrew G — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:40:41 +0000

Hello, this sounds great and I would like to try it, however the technical details are a bit beyond me. Can you give me a hint?

1. installed Greasemonkey on fFox
2. chose notepad as text editor
3. copied full code into the text program that comes up
4. navigated to the web page, added to Greasemonkey as included page.
Not working. What do I do now?
Thanks.