Putting Public Art on the Map

Photo by Mike Nice of Greenville Daily Photo and the Trolley Tracker

Greenville recently unveiled the Rose Crystal statue by Dale Chihuly. I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of the piece. I certainly liked it better than other pieces in Greenville, but more than anything it left me confused and interested to learn more about public art. My solution, hack together a collection of #publicart pictures on Instagram and put them on a map.

The Tools I Used

1. Instagram
2. Zapier
3. Google Sheets
4. Jessica Lord’s Sheets.js and Fork ‘N Go
5. MapBox

What I Did

1. Searched #publicart in Instagram
2. Setup a Google Sheet. It’s going to need columns for: Title, Img-URL, Link, Author, Lat and Lon.
3. Setup a Zapier to save media from “New Tagged Media” to the Google Sheet. Here’s the full screen shot of the setup.

1. Next step: Thank Jessica Lord for making everything else super easy.
2. Fork-N-Go a fullscreen map with a Google Sheets backend.
3. Make some updates to the code:

Change 1:

Sheetsee.addTileLayer(map, ‘examples.map-i86nkdio’) to your own custom MapBox key

Change 2:

Make sure your optionsJSON and template HTML match up with your Sheets column headers.

Change 3:

Replace the var URL for the Sheet with my publicly published sheet

That should do it. I’m the hackiest of hackers, but putting this together was very easy (thanks to the work of, you know, actual programmers) and pretty damn fun.