I’m in New Orleans, or more precisely on a plane heading that way, with my class from the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. There, along with my co-instructor, Bill Gannon, and Dartmouth College researcher Quintus Jett, we’re planning to visit a neighborhood called Gentilly.
Our purpose is to work on a project with two aims. First, we’re hoping to help a community tell its own story. Second, we hope to do this via a demonstration project of tomorrow’s citizen media.
Quintus Jett is the brains behind the Gentilly Project, a mapping effort that’s designed to show, block by block and house by house, the condition of reconstruction in the neighborhood. (Update: Friday’s New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper has a front page story on his project. Very cool…) We’re here to augment and extend the great work he and his team have done.
More on this tomorrow, when we get out into the community.