Local project · Digital society
Mural Hunter
A collaborative, geolocated catalogue of street art from around the world
About the project
Mural Hunter was a citizen science initiative within Civitas, a heritage outreach and heritage education platform created at the University of Zaragoza. The project was led by Pilar Rivero.
Street art is ephemeral: works appear, change and disappear, and few survive the passage of time. Mural Hunter set out to preserve and catalogue this heritage by building, together, a worldwide catalogue of geolocated mural art.
With an app for Android and iOS, anyone could photograph, geolocate and tag the street art and graffiti around them. The images were uploaded to a shared map, so the works remained on record even after they had physically disappeared.
Project objectives
- To collaboratively create a geolocated catalogue of mural art from around the world.
- To study whether works survive or disappear, and how they become part of the collective imagination of the communities where they are found.
- To encourage public involvement and build a community around each work.
- To develop historical and geographical thinking, with activities designed by the ARGOS research group together with nursery, primary and secondary school teachers.
The role of Ibercivis
Fundación Ibercivis helped promote the project and build a community of users around the app: the people who found the street art they wanted to catalogue and placed it on the map.
Our activities
- Promotion of the initiative and the app on Ibercivis’s channels.
- Engagement of the app’s user community.
- Presentation of Mural Hunter by Pilar Rivero at the launch of the Observatory of Citizen Science in Zaragoza, held at Etopia on 26 September 2018.
Project details
Type of project
Local
Duration
Since 2016
Consortium
University of Zaragoza (ARGOS research group – Civitas), Fundación Ibercivis
Area
Digital society