Manchester’s blue plaque data unearthed by blogger’s FOI request

Have you ever looked up at one of the blue circular plaques on a Manchester building and wanted to know more?
Does reading that a property once housed the French painter Adolphe Valette or was the scene of a rescue of two prisoners, which later led to the last public hanging in the Manchester area, spark a thirst for knowledge in you?
It does for blogger Frankie Roberto. He has set out on a quest to bring together data around this sort of cultural information and is exploring ways to get it into people’s hands.
In a recent post on his blog, Frankie says: “One of the things that struck me was that when museums talk about ‘mobile learning’, what they tend to mean is using mobile devices (PDAs, mobile phones and proprietary media handsets) as a platform for engaging learners within the museum.
“Quite often this is in the form of what you might call (slightly rudely) ’souped-up’ audio tours.
“However, I couldn’t help but feel that this is missing a trick. The whole point of mobile technologies, surely, is their mobility. Mobile devices don’t need to be confined to the internal spaces of a museum. Mobile learning can be be about learning ‘out there’, away from the museum, in the visitor’s own time and space.”
So he set out to find out what data is already held on the blue plaque schemes with a view to developing a platform which could lead to a cultural tour of the city.
First he asked his Twitter followers if they could help:
“I asked if anyone knew where you could get geolocated data about blue plaques, and what a response I got!”
……and then he put a Freedom of Information request into the city council which has resulted in a full list of every plaque under its control.
And of course he’s shared it all with the rest of us – see here. Even in the form of this raw data, it makes for a useful reference document but the possibilities for some sort of interactive geo-locative cultural service are tantalising.
Can’t wait to see where Frankie takes it next.
Related links via the FrankieRoberto blog
• The list of locations and inscriptions that commemorate people, places and events that are part of Manchester’s historic past.

• A spreadsheet of blue plaque information for London.
• The sort of map which this data could inform – soon?
Thanks to Neil101 on Flickr for the picture on this post.