Wednesday is the one-year anniversary of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. All week long on The Takeaway, we'll be speaking to residents of the Gulf region whose lives, businesses and communities were profoundly impacted by the oil gusher that followed the explosion.

BP has already paid out more than $300 million to businesses and individuals affected by the oil, which started gushing into the Gulf of Mexico on Apirl 20, but the company's claims system has been criticized by business owners who say they have had to deal with multiple adjusters. Attorney Kenneth Feinberg was hired by BP to serve as administrator of its $20 billion compensation fund and he will begin processing claims for victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill later this month.

A federal judge in New Orleans has overturned a moratorium on deepwater oil drilling, instituted by President Obama at the end of May. The judge said the Interior Department's decision to suspend drilling in the Gulf was arbitrary. Obama, on Tuesday, vowed to appeal the decision.

For 57 days, oil has been gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, following an explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. That's 57 days of trying to determine what the leak looks like, how big it is, who it's affecting and where the oil has hit land. In other words: 57 days to get pretty creative.

Jeff Warren is a student and fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. He's working on mapping the Gulf leak using digital cameras tied to balloons and kites. Here are some of the photos Warren and his colleagues have taken, using cheap digital cameras, kites, garbage bags, and tanks of helium.

"You take each image and you stretch it on a map and then every pixel of the location is a place in the real world," says Warren.

Lauren Craig is a master's student at Tulane and a photo volunteer. She's one of the people attaching a camera to a balloon and taking thousands upon thousands of photos.

After the jump, a short video by Jeff Warren in which he describes the project.

The Deepwater Horizon oil gusher has demonstrated that severe changes in how the U.S. drills for oil are necessary; could this oil disaster be an opportunity for stronger environmental policy?

Across the country, a groundswell of public outrage continues to grow against oil giant BP as oil continues to leak into the Gulf of Mexico. That's despite the news that a cap is helping to collect between 10,000 and 20,000 gallons of oil a day. Some Twitter users, irritated at the situation, have vented their outrage to the Twitter user @BP.

Unfortunately, @BP is not that BP. It's the Twitter handle of Bryan Pendleton, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon who says a typical tweet is "'clean it up, followed by an expletive."