By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Mapping their way to cheap eats

[googlemaps https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=217976351939574142965.00049ed98f794470e5925&ll=42.343955,-71.089697&spn=0.022204,0.036478&z=14&output=embed&w=425&h=350]

Please have a look at my students’ Google map project in my Reinventing the News class. Every semester, this is always one of my favorites: students fan out into the neighborhhoods around Northeastern to take pictures, write blog posts and plot them on a map. This time, they chose to review cheap-eats places in and around the Back Bay.

The project is currently near the top of Boston.com’s Your Town/Back Bay site (Northeastern has a partnership with the Boston Globe to provide content to Your Town). I think the students did a great job. They took it seriously, they had fun and they learned something about how free, easy-to-use online tools such as mapping can enhance journalism.

Update: It’s featured prominently on the Your Town/Roxbury site as well.

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4 Comments

  1. Christian Avard

    I’m surprised the Busy Bee in Brookline didn’t make the cheap-eat list. It’s on Beacon Street. Take the C Line to Saint Mary’s T-stop.

  2. Mike Stucka

    Are you doing this through Google Maps directly, or Google Fusion Tables? I’ve been seeing (and doing) some cool stuff with Fusion Tables, which is more geared to take input from a spreadsheet and mess with it.

    Something that inspired me: http://www.thenewstribune.com/censusapps

    Something I have no #@*& idea how they did: http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/census-2010/

    The thing I worked on yet hasn’t been released yet.

  3. Nancy Mades

    Extremely well-done and…delicious! Great job, students!

  4. BJ Roche

    Hey Dan, nice job on the part of your students.

    This was a great idea. Relevant, useful and fun.

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