Category Archives: HIstorypin Projects

Our Year of the Bay Hackathon at the California Historical Society

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Participants listen to Richard Everett of SF Maritime National Park in the California Historical Society gallery.

On May 23rd, Historypin hosted an evening hackathon at the California Historical Society in San Francisco as part of our Year of the Bay project. The event, in partnership with Pastmapper, explored historic photographs of businesses along the San Francisco waterfront from the SFTMA Photo Archives, the California Historical Society, SF Public Library, and SF Maritime National Park.

One of the photographs we explored during the evening, taken from the foot of Market Street c1910. From the California Historical Society.

What is a hackathon? It’s when a bunch of people get together to use a variety of tools (often technological ones) to solve problems. With this event, we aimed at contributing better historical information and resources that aid in the discovery of historical data. We asked visitors to bring laptops, books, and other materials that they could use for research during the night. The library at the California Historical Society even shared their historic collection of San Francisco City Directories as an available resource.

Participants, including Bradley Thompson of Pastmapper (center), help to research historical information behind photos on their devices brought from home.

A group of about 50 worked collaboratively around a handful of photos to see if we could solve some mysteries within them; dates, locations, business information, etc. Participants liked how they could come and not only consume information, but contribute to the conversation. Assigning tasks, collaborating on finding citations, and having hi-res versions of the images readily available to zoom in on were some of the things we were able to adjust and experiment with to best collect data. In addition to looking at the social aspect of collecting information in an event setting, experiments like this hackathon are also serving to inform Historypin user interface development online for capturing and discussing historical metadata in fun and meaningful ways.

With this hackathon and other Year of the Bay community events, we’re exploring how local historical and heritage institutions can involve their audiences and communities more by inviting collaboration around their historical content.  This is a chance for like-minded people to come together and discuss local Bay history, with the extra incentive of being able to contribute information to under-researched photographs from local history collections.

Jon Voss and Bradley Thompson introducing our hackathon event at the California Historical Society.

Executive Director of the California Historical Society Anthea Hartig joining in as a "hacker"and helping to research old photos of SF waterfront businesses.

To add your own suggestions and comments to the photographs we looked at during the event, follow this link to the tagged pins on the Year of the Bay map. With events like these and with your help, we can enrich the collections of some great local Bay Area institutions and share our findings with the wider online community.

Historypin at the Opening of Curating the Bay in San Francisco

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Visitors learning about Historypin at our California Historical Society pinning station.

We are pleased to report that this week, our joint crowdsourcing project with Stanford University, Year of the Bay, became a part of an exciting new museum exhibition in San Francisco. The exhibit, called Curating the Bay: Crowdsourcing a New Environmental History, is a collaboration with the California Historical Society (CHS) to open their collections to the public in a new and interactive way.

Museums and archives alike always aspire to having a completed history of a certain topic, and in Curating the Bay the CHS takes a leap into uncharted territory by asking visitors to fill in the blanks rather than presenting them with a finished narrative. Many of the photographs, paintings, and documents in their collections still contain historical mysteries, and the exhibition invites the public to help solve them as well as to contribute their own stories and materials.

This is where Historypin comes in.  Excitingly, we have set up a pinning station within the CHS’s exhibition, so visitors can scan and add their materials into the Year of the Bay project while they are there. And since the project is at yearofthebay.org, visitors not only from the Bay Area but from all over the world can contribute to the history of San Francisco Bay.

California Historical Society docents learning about Historypin at our pinning station

Up close at our pinning station.

A huge number of people came out in support of the exhibit during its opening this past Sunday, April 7. With music, food, drinks, and good conversation, many visitors expressed excitement at the prospect of contributing to history.

Lots of visitors arriving to the evening opening

One of my favorite parts of the exhibition is a touchscreen display of the Year of the Bay website that we created just for exhibits (pictured below).

A close-up of the custom-made interface of our Year of the Bay touchscreen.

And with great visual flair, the CHS has surrounded the touchscreen display with an analog version of the map of the Bay Area directly behind the touchscreen, complete with pins! As the exhibition continues, they will add visitor contributions to the wall along with their own “pins.” Fantastic!

The wall of San Francisco Bay pins that will be added with visitor contributions during the course of the exhibition.

Visitors exploring the wall and touchscreen during the opening.

With this exhibition and the outreach activities surrounding it, we hope to help create a richer and more diverse history of the San Francisco Bay. Since the opening, we have already received many wonderful contributions to yearofthebay.org from all over the world. If you are in the Bay Area from now until August 25th, come on down to the exhibition and try your hand at solving some historical mysteries, or follow along online as we tweet about them weekly.

One of the many mystery items in our Curating the Bay exhibit. Can you help us learn more about it?

And finally, videos and pictures are sometimes worth more than words, so here is a short video Historypin has made to explain our exciting new Year of the Bay project. Take a look!

All new Historypin!

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We are proud to launch a brand new Historypin!

After months of researching, planning, designing, testing and building we are ready to share with you all a major new redesign which, we hope, shows off all your content in the best possible light and gives you lots of new features to enjoy.

The all new homepage now has a Pin of the Day gallery, so the winning images of this prestigious award can be easily seen by all. You can also look back through past winners. Upload your best images to be in for a chance of featuring here.

We also have a brand new totaliser, the arrival of which is well timed as we have just reached 200,000 materials shared on Historypin. Thankyou to every one of you that has contributed to this figure.

You can now see every item added to Historypin in the new Activity Feed, which shows what you are all doing on the site, be it adding photos, videos and audio clips, favoriting other people’s contributions, adding comments, creating Tours and Collections or adding items to Projects.

Projects are also a new feature. They bring together content around certain themes. We now have several projects including Year of the bay, Remember how we used to… and My Grandparents are better than yours for you to explore, add to and comment on.

Loads of work has gone into tidying things up, beautifying and simplifying the user experience and interface, plus there has been lots of techy work finding solutions to difficult problems behind the scenes. A massive thankyou and congratulations is due to the creative and digital teams - check out their faces here.

Remember how we used to…

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Daily Herald circulation department, 11th May 1935, shared by National Media Museum

Remember how we used to work, play, watch and listen, cook and clean, keep warm and celebrate?

We are excited to announce a brand new project that looks back at how energy has changed the way we do everything things over the last century and are looking for your contributions.

Almost everything we do, from making breakfast to going to work, is very different to how our grandparents did it.

In 1952, when Queen Elizabeth II took the throne, only one in five households had a washing machine, one in ten a telephone, one in twenty a fridge. Almost nobody had central heating. Fewer than half of all households had a television and less than one in five households had a car.

Children listening to talking books, 1953, shared by Mirrorpix

Over the last 60 years children have changed the way they play, workplaces have changed the way they look, and we have shifted our tastes in the music we listen to and the clothes we wear.

So if you’ve got a photo of your parents watching retro TVs, or your granddad working in an office for example, add it in!

Girls listening to the Ruffler and Walker jukebox, 1964, shared by Mirrorpix

The project was created in partnership npower and Mirrorpix and aims to collate over 5,000 photos, videos, audio clips and stories around this theme from across the UK by Spring 2013. To help do this we’ll be running workshops and memory bank sessions with a selection of schools, care homes and retired npower employees to gather old photos and memories.

Explore this archive of amazing photos and add yours here.