hebig.org/blog
Personal webnode of Haiko Hebig

Now that I took Gigabytes of photos in the abandoned and torn down steel mills and other former sites of heavy industries here in Dortmund and surrounding cities, comes up the question: how to organize, how to present them?

Why not installing PHP Gallery, drag, drop and forget? Because thats what you do with party, holiday and other random shots. When I started taking steel shots, I was driven by curiosity. Giantic buildings: 200 meters long, 500, 700, 1000? You name it, we got it. Incredible machinery, formerly the bleeding edge of technology, at your fingertips: Let's see how this one works. This must be the vacuum treatment. How beautifully engineered this roll stand is, what a brute force solution that one is. Traces of people who worked here: A jacket. A TV magazine. Personal items left in a locker. A plant where everything looks like the workers would return in just a minute. Another plant, shut down decades ago and untouched since - time travels. Control rooms and switch rooms: Here, some just a couple of years old, crammed with computers, TV screens, keyboards, mouses. Lots in 1970ies, 1980ies fashion: modular design with custom-made discrete circuits plus loads of Sinumeric labels. Some, back from the 1950ies: Huge panels, a plant schematic painted on them, bakelite knobs and switches, grey smocks, Dr Strangelove to return and take command any second now.

There is just this detail: nothing of it is to last. It is a dance with death, a race against excavators and explosives. It happened more than once that I explored a building, planned to return to take photos two days later - and then found nothing but debris (If you can remove an entire full-grown steel mill within a year, tearing down an entire secondary building within two days is just a finger exercise). The more I grew acquainted with the plants, the more the focus of my work shifted from taking photos just because I like to take photos (most hobbies are a bit self referential, aren't they) to documenting the plants, their machinery and their end. This requires a much more structured approach in what and when to photograph. Comes in other content: press clipping, vintage photos and drawings, anecdotes collected when talking with former workers or area residents, web links. So what I want is not another hierarchically structured photo gallery. I want to throw all the content into a box and be able to generate a variety of views on it:

• Show me all available content on this part of the plant in chronological order. Show me just the photos in a timeline view. Give me a blog like view on all available press clippings, anecdotes and web links.
• Show me a list of other parts of the plant nearby to the current location. Show me a list of all other installations of this kind across all locations covered, e.g. a list of all LD converters photographed so far.
• Let me explore the database browsing by year, by location, by technology, by process step. So if I chose "Dortmund", show me a list of all Dortmund plants covered. If I chose steelmaking, let me chose between crude steel making and secondary treatment. If I chose crude steel making, let me chose between LD (basic oxygen), Siemens Martin, Thomas and EAF. As there is just one EAF (electric arc furnace) in the archives, show me all pictures of the Ruhrstahl/Rheinstahl furnace in Hattingen when selecting EAF.
• Plus, for sites that have been covered extensively, like the Hoesch Phoenix steel mill, provide me with a clickable map: Show where this control room has been located. If I click on an item on the map, tell me what is it, when it has been installed and when torn down, and give me a chronologically sorted view on all available photos of the item.

Obviously, there are (at least) two dimensions to such a plan: the technical, to come up with a flexible framework, and the social, to motivate other people with similar interests to throw in their content and knowledge - I talked to a number of such people, and most liked the idea. Each collection is valuable by itself, but just a small part of the jigsaw - if all those collections get combined (by actually combining them on one server or by providing links to resources located elsewhere on the web) you get more than just a bigger part of the jigsaw, you get a collection of historic value. Just image that some day, you can click on a certain part of a plant and out the system spits a complete photographic history, starting with vintage photos from the early days of this part and ending with a shot of how the site looks with it removed again, plus notes and anecdotes that provide context. (If you really want a documentation, joining forces is a must. The four full-grown steel mills here in Dortmund - Westfalenhütte, Phoenix West, Phoenix Ost and Union - covered more than 1,000 hectares alone, plus what's left of various coke plants and mines. It's impossible even to just keep track of what has been torn down when when marching alone.)

How should a system to organize, search and present the (mostly photographic) content of a huge archive should look like? What more is required than geo- and time-tagging all items? Looks like a good opportunity to play around with Pedantic Semantic Web technologies: all your RDF are belong to us. Andy of Surf*Mind*Musings wants to develop a Faceted Image Browsing system that has an not too small intersection with my idea, so we think about working together on the system layouts. Resources we come across will be added to the list of Mapping and Visualization Resources posted a while ago and to a new list of RDF metatagging stuff. Does anything exist at this point? No, it's in an early playing with ideas stage, and it might take a while before results will become visible. Until then, Industrial Night and Magic, the existing photo section of this site, will continue to grow. Not a database, no semantic whizzbang, just a small collection of hand-crafted galleries - the part where the photography will go, not the documentation.