Media And Place (MAP) Productions is a non-profit working at the intersections of software, journalism, media arts and education.

From online to installation, broadcast to mobile, our mission is to tell powerful stories, inspire democratic participation, strengthen the public domain and deepen the vitality of local communities through innovative technologies, interactive documentaries and educational programs.

Strong adherents of open-source philosophy, we aim to empower artists, journalists, scholars, artists, students, educators and citizens to produce, share, filter and map media in order to increase access to meaningful information, build capacity for civic engagement and transform the way people experience the world around them.

We are based in the middle of Cambridge, MA. Extra special thanks to the Citizen Media Law Project, Online Media Legal Network and Proskauer Rose LLP for helping us to get our organization off the ground!

Partners                                                                  

Projects                                                                                       

Zeega   www.zeega.org



Zeega is an open-source HTML5 platform for creating interactive documentaries and inventing new forms of storytelling. The project is funded, in part, by the Knight News Challenge.

Zeega will make it easy to collaboratively produce, curate and publish participatory multimedia projects on web, tablet and mobile devices. Zeega will enable anyone to create participatory projects that combine original content with photos, videos, text, audio and maps via APIs from across the web. Our mission is not only to give voice to individuals, but to create a platform that empowers individuals to give voice to others.

Zeega is a registered trademark of Media And Place (MAP) Productions, and it is the non-profit which holds the copyright and grants the software's open-source license.

Mapping Main Street   www.mappingmainstreet.org



Created with radio producer Ann Heppermann, Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the United States through stories, photos, and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. The project's website seamlessly integrates and automatically maps media pulled from the APIs of NPR, Flickr and Vimeo, creating nonlinear algorithmic narratives that traverse the country. Launched in 2009, Mapping Main Street is produced with AIR, NPR, the CPB, and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Download Press PDF (6.9 mb)

People                                                                                         

Our core design, documentary and production team draws upon extensive experience in journalism, software development, location-based technologies, mapping, media arts, architecture and education.

Jesse Shapins is a media artist, theorist and social entrepreneur whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Wired and Metropolis, and been exhibited at MoMA, Deutsches Architektur Zentrum and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, among other venues. He is the Co-Creator of Yellow Arrow, the groundbreaking mobile storytelling platform, as well as Zeega, Mapping Main Street, UnionDocs, Periplurban, and The Colors Berlin, amongst other projects. He is on the faculty of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he co-teaches the courses Media Archaeology of Place and The Mixed-Reality City. He also completing a PhD in Urbanism and Critical Media Practice titled "Mapping the Urban Database Documentary: Utopias of Panoramic Perception, Sensory Estrangement and Participatory Media." He is Co-Founder/Associate Director at metaLAB (at) Harvard, an experimental research unit at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, dedicated to innovation in arts, media and humanities.

Kara Oehler is a radio documentary producer and media artist whose work over the past decade has focused upon pushing the boundaries of narrative journalism both on the air and across multiple platforms, combining investigative storytelling with participatory media, building new systems and opportunities for education and artistic practice. Kara is the creator of multiple transmedia projects on which she has created new forms of interactive experience, including the collaborative documentary Mapping Main Street; Capitol of Punk, featured in MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition; Zeega; and the UnionDocs Collaborative. Since 1999, her radio stories and media projects, often created with longtime collaborator Ann Heppermann, have received George Foster Peabody, Edward R. Murrow, Associated Press, and Third Coast International Audio Festival awards and been exhibited at MoMA, among other venues. Kara is a 2011-2012 Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University and Co-Founder/Documentary Arts + Media Innovation Fellow at metaLAB (at) Harvard, an experimental research unit at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, dedicated to innovation in arts, media and humanities.

James Burns is an avid hacker. He built the API-driven website Mapping Main Street, constructing a system that automatically interrelates media feeds from across the web into thematic and geographic pathways. Currently, he is focused upon developing Zeega into a revolutionary framework for creative invention, enabling journalists, artists, scholars and citizens to easily create immersive, interactive projects through combinations of mobile devices, interactive video, stickers, receipt printers, large-scale media collections, data feeds and many to-be-invented tools. James holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard University, where his work in economics has investigated topics in Game Theory, Market Design and Decision Theory. He is Co-Founder/Relational Knowledge Fellow at metaLAB (at) Harvard, an experimental research unit at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, dedicated to innovation in arts, media and humanities.