Historypin: Past Meets Present in Street View
What urban storytelling has to do with the end of WWII and Google Maps mashups.
Photographic Time Machine is one of our all-time most popular articles, but it spotlights projects that, while fascinating, are one-off art experiments. How fantastic would it be if there were a broader, more expansive platform for intersecting past and present through historical photography, a digital time machine of sorts? Well, now there is. Enter Historypin — a mashup of modern mapping and archival photos that offers a new way to explore and share history.
Developed by We Are What We Do, the social movement behind Anya Hindmarch’s now-iconic I’m Not a Plastic Bag bag, in partnership with Google, the project pulls photos from various national archives and private-sector collections, and “pins” them over Google Maps Street View to create a fascinating fold in the space/time continuum.
Archival photos can both be dated and geotagged, painting a precise portrait of how specific locations have changed. Users can even submit their own and write stories about them, adding a wonderful urban storytelling component akin to Hitotoki.
From 19th-century views of Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station to London’s iconic High Street on Victory in Europe Day in 1945, Historypin features nearly 2,000 photos and stories pinned just a couple of days after the official launch and has the potential to become the largest user-generated archive of historical images and stories, documenting not only how the physicality of our world is changing but also how our experience of it is responding to those changes — a priceless timecapsule of cultural change.
We’ve got a weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
- Vintage Design: Innovation Lessons from the Past Bleeding-edge art direction, what Obama's agricultural policy has to do with vintage graphic design, and why 2009 is exactly like 1939 – what the visual history of the Chicago Tribune has to teach us about modern graphic design....
- Street Art: From All Sides & Five Continents The urban anthropology of creativity, or why copyright law is swimming against the cultural current....
- Google Groupies Galore: Goollery What album covers have to do with shoe shopping and Renaissance paintings - a comprehensive gallery of Google-related projects from a long the world. ...
- Life on Google Why Google holds the key to modernity and what Madonna arms have to do with the moon landing. We love Google. And now they’ve joined forces with another icon of our time, LIFE Magazine, to bring us something truly marvelous — LIFE’s photo archive, spanning millions of never-before-seen photos from...
- Street Pickings: Riding Rebels Sticking it to the man on Kryptonite at a time, and then some art....
Historypin – look into the past with archival photos overlaid on Google Street View http://bit.ly/94Z9tT
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Historypin conoce que habia antes de lo que conoces gracias a Street View http://bit.ly/9l9g5k
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
If you missed it ? Historypin – look into the past with archival photos overlaid on Google Street View http://bit.ly/94Z9tT
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @brainpicker: If you missed it ? Historypin – look into the past with archival photos overlaid on Google Street View http://bit.ly/94Z9tT
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @brainpicker: If you missed it ? Historypin – look into the past with archival photos overlaid on Google Street View http://bit.ly/94Z9tT
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Looks like serious fun! – archival photos overlaid over Google Street View maps http://bit.ly/bxCntt
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @brainpicker: If you missed it ? Historypin – look into the past with archival photos overlaid on Google Street View http://bit.ly/94Z9tT
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
FYI, this blows my mind. http://bit.ly/ci95Ti
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
@theretronaut “Historypin – look into past with archival photos overlaid on Google Street View http://bit.ly/94Z9tT” via @brainpicker
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
mooi! RT @brainpicker historypin – look into the past with archival photos overlaid on Google Street View http://bit.ly/94Z9tT
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Historypin – look into the past with archival photos overlaid on Google Street View http://bit.ly/94Z9tT /@brainpicker
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @brainpicker: If you missed it ? Historypin – look into the past with archival photos overlaid on Google Street View http://bit.ly/94Z9tT
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
? Historypin RT @brainpicker If you missed it – Look into the past with archival photos overlaid on Google Street View http://bit.ly/94Z9tT
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
[...] time. Today, in Serendipity-land, I came accross a website called Historypin. I read about it on Brain Pickings. org where I saw a nifty video of how this site works. At its coolest, it works with Google Maps street [...]
RT @brainpicker: If you missed it ? Historypin – look into the past with archival photos overlaid on Google Street View http://bit.ly/94Z9tT
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Historypin: Past Meets Present in Street View http://j.mp/aR30yW
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @brainpicker: If you missed it ? Historypin – look into the past with archival photos overlaid on Google Street View http://bit.ly/94Z9tT
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Time meet Space: History Pin is BRILLIANT: http://bit.ly/9mlOG0 Crowdmapping photos: @brainpicker’s review: http://bit.ly/9l9g5k
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Time meet Space: History Pin is BRILLIANT: http://bit.ly/9mlOG0 Crowdmapping photos: @brainpicker’s review: http://bit.ly/9l9g5k
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
amazing urban storytelling! HISTORYPIN Past Meets Present in Street View http://bit.ly/aRpN5r (via @loraba)
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
http://ping.fm/ZNPig
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
????? ????:-)????? ??????? ?????? ?? ????????:-))
Historypin: Past Meets Present on a Street View Corner (via @brainpicker) http://bit.ly/9vlcdy
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
The coolest use of maps I’ve seen in a long time (via @brainpicker) ~ Historypin: http://bit.ly/bYFTd5
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @JustinKownacki: The coolest use of maps I’ve seen in a long time (via @brainpicker) ~ Historypin: http://bit.ly/bYFTd5
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
@DavidSpinks That’s an idea for another blog post. Video-wise, I can’t think of many. Photo-wise, Historypin intrigues: http://bit.ly/bYFTd5
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @JustinKownacki: The coolest use of maps I’ve seen in a long time (via @brainpicker) ~ Historypin: http://bit.ly/bYFTd5
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Historypin —a mashup of modern mapping and archival photos via @hornOKplease. http://bit.ly/9l9g5k
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Historypin: Past Meets Present in Street View: http://bit.ly/9Tc1vV (via OCLC’s Above the Fold) #in
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Historypin: Past Meets Present on a Street View Corner | Brain Pickings: http://bit.ly/bKPhtG
This comment was originally posted on Twitter