Old Toronto turns more than 37,000 archival photographs from the City of Toronto Archives and Toronto Public Library into walking tours of the city. The tool builds on OldTO, the geocoded photo map originally created by Sidewalk Labs and later revived by Back Lane Studios. While OldTO showed what was photographed in a given place, Old Toronto actually generates walking routes of the city. Users pick one of 25 starting points and one of 12 historical eras, from 1788 to 2018. The Planner then generates an optimized walking route anchored by landmarks, with clusters of archival photos along the way. Because each era’s photographs are distributed differently across the city, each era produces a different route through the same collection. The project explores approaches to visualizing archival collections that bridge the organizational logic of the archive, arranged by provenance, date, and description, and the lived experience of a city, organized by place and movement.
dh+lib Review
This post was produced through a cooperation between Kayla Abner, Amy Gay, and Claire Burns (Editors-at-Large), Hillary Richardson and Molly McGuire (Editors for the week), Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Ruth Carpenter, Pamella Lach, Christine Salek, and Rachel Starry (dh+lib Review Editors), and Tom Lee (Technical Editor).