Welcome to our Historypin Channel.
What is Historypin?
Historypin is an online, user-generated archive of historical photos, videos, audio recordings and personal recollections.
Historypin sets out to bring people together around the history of their families and streets, from across different generations and cultures, to explore and create a global communal archive, building up a picture of the past.
The main hub of the project is Historypin.com, which allows users to upload content and pin it to a particular date and time on the Historypin map of the world. Street level images and videos can be also be overlaid onto Google Maps Street View on the Historypin site for then-and-now contrast.
Also, through the free Historypin Smartphone app, users can become immersed in the history of their current location, submit a photo, or view content on the go.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdT3eKdto4w&w=560&h=315]
Why do we have a channel?
Geo-location technologies are really changing the way that we experience content such as photographic archives. We believe that searching for photographs based around a particular location can be a really powerful way of finding out information about an area and the stories that can be revealed along the way.
We have been making our photographic collections more widely available for a number of years in Flickr and believe that these need to be accessible to a broader public for use, research, innovation, story-telling and sharing. Historypin has provided The Powerhouse Museum with another platform and audience to share our collections through a different online and mobile experience.
‘Then and now’ photography has become a very powerful tool and can reveal a lot about how areas have either developed or not changed at all. Historypin’s overlay with Google Street View is a great feature of their online and mobile experience, the fade in and out aspect is particularly strong and gives the viewer an incredible insight into history and how certain areas used to look.
Not only can we do a bulk-upload of our data into our Channel we can also embed all this information back into our own website.
What is in our channel?
We have over 400 geo-located images located in our channel that come from some of our specific photographic collections. These collections include the Tyrrell, Phillips, Clyde Engineering, Bob Lucas, Don Harkness and the Tom Lennon photography archive.
We will be loading more images over time and creating tours for you as well. We would also love it if you created a tour using our content and then shared that back with us. We would love to feature these as well. We hope you enjoy our new channel.
What’s next for Powerhouse and HistoryPin?
We are currently partnering with Historypin on a project that will be launched in 2013 through a year long series of events and activities and will involve pinning content from all over Australia, from many different organisations and the public. More details about this project will be announced later in the year.
More information will be added to our Historypin page as we develop our Channel.
