About Passing Places

What it is

Passing Places tells you the story of the place you are passing, as you pass it. It keeps a corpus of place-linked context for Ireland, watches what a moving person is approaching, chooses the one thing worth telling, and says it in a few grounded sentences. Then it goes quiet until the next place earns a word. It needs no destination, and it never tells the same story twice in one journey.

Where the stories come from

Every story rests on a source you could open yourself: the National Monuments Service's record of monuments and places, the Wreck Inventory of Ireland, the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, the Placenames Database of Ireland, OpenStreetMap, and public-domain histories, journals and guides of each county, most of them written in the nineteenth century. Each record keeps the passage it came from, its source and its retrieval date, and a grade for how precisely it is located.

Three promises

• Grounded. Every name, date and number comes from the record. When the record is thin, the companion says less rather than filling the silence.
• Honest about where. It says "right here" only when it knows exactly, "along here" on a street, and "somewhere around here" when a story belongs to a townland rather than a spot.
• Quiet by default. An empty road is shown as such. Silence is designed, not hidden.

Where it stands

Passing Places is a research project and not yet an app you can download. The corpus is growing county by county, the companion is tested in a browser simulator and on drives along the Wild Atlantic Way and the roads between the cities, and the sources are being cleared for public use one at a time. The research instance behind the sign-in is private.

Who

It is built in Ireland by Mark Finlay. A note about a place, a source or a mistake is always welcome through the contact page.