John Johnston has recently blogged about a mapping project called Hmsg maps that’s worth a look.
It’s an elegant bit of digital storytelling from Charles Veasey and J. Craig Thompson where they traced a spiral shaped path from a key location in New York State, collecting audio and video and then mashing it together into a custom-made web app (using ActionScript and the Google Maps API).
Here’s the blog post and the actual project.
It’s wonderfully immersive in the way it gives multiple perspectives on a contrasting variety of locations (first person and and birds’ eye point of view, audio).
John has done his own using Javascript with a detailed explanation of how he did it.
Theres something about these videos of stillness that give a real flavour of the locations, making them great storytelling tools.
It may not be as immersive but it would be possible to do something similar straight out of Google Maps using the My Places function or Google Earth. Use the drawing tools to draw your path (spiral like they’ve done here, or perhaps a transect, zig zag, whatever). Once you’ve captured the media in the field, upload them to YouTube and embed them in placemark description boxes.
It would be a much cruder solution but more accessible to people without the web dev skills.