Category Archives: News

Investing in the Creative Reuse of Cultural Heritage

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Historypin is proud to join with 26 other partners from across the European cultural heritage, technology, creative, media, and academic sectors for an exciting 30 month project designed to demonstrate and instigate the creative reuse and remixing of digital cultural heritage. 

eCreative kickoff at the Austrian National Library. (Thx to Max Kaiser for group photo and Erwin Verbruggen for the mashup!)

The online portal Europeana provides access to more than 25 million digitized objects of cultural heritage from European libraries, archives and museums. The Europeana Creative project will actively encourage and promote the creative reuse of digital cultural heritage and associated metadata made available through Europeana. As part of the project, a number of test applications will be developed as proof of concepts and which are being designed together with a number of events to spur innovation and further development by entrepreneurs from the creative industries.

The project was officially launched in February at the Austrian National Library in Vienna meeting where representatives of all of the partner organizations were assembled. There were presentations on the various work packages and workshops were used for the further development of the specific plans and tasks.

GOAL

The Europeana Creative project will demonstrate that Europeana can facilitate the creative re-use of cultural heritage metadata and content. The project will establish an Open Laboratory Network, create a legal and business framework for content re-use and implement all needed technical infrastructure.

WHY NOW?

In the last few years we’ve seen a growing global convergence of communities working toward usability and discovery of openly licensed cultural heritage assets and data. Increasingly, the cherished institutions that have for so long provided stewardship of these materials and their accompanying data are embracing and investing in new ways of providing access to this information, opening a new world of possibilities for how we celebrate our shared global history. We’ve seen this trend illustrated across Europe.

The reuse of open data is an important part of the Digital Agenda for Europe.  There’s been several major activities recently throughout Europe to celebrate and stimulate the reuse of cultural heritage, such as the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki last fall, and GLAM-WIKI 2013 held in London earlier this month to name a few.  Last year, the Hack4Europe! competition was organized to develop applications to demonstrate the social and economic value of open cultural data.

In September 2012, Europeana encouraged the development of innovative applications by publishing the metadata for 25 million cultural heritage objects under the terms of the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication 0 (CC0) license, and have also provided free and open access to the metadata through Application Programming Interfaces and Linked Open Data. Europeana Creative will not only use this metadata, but also many of the digital objects themselves, which are available for re-use together with the necessary licenses.

5 TEST APPLICATIONS

The project will create five pilot applications in the thematic areas of History Education, Natural History Education, Tourism, Social Networks, and Design, then conduct open innovation challenges to identify, incubate and spin-off viable projects into the commercial sector.

Pilot → Challenge → Spin-off: the workflow for pilot development. This is further illustrated in the Work Package 4 presentation on Slideshare.

The project will also undertake an extensive stakeholder engagement campaign promoting the benefits of cultural heritage content re-use to creative industries and to memory institutions.

HISTORYPIN’S ROLE

Historypin will be focusing on increased data integration with Europeana as well as creative reuse of geolocated sound archives as part of the Social Networks pilot.  We’re excited to feature a number of sound recordings and themes on Historypin from Europeana partners, including the British Library Sound Archive, and work package leader Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision. We’ll also be getting  support in this work package from Ontotext AD.

PROJECT PARTNERS

The project brings together 26 partners from 14 different countries and is a strong alliance between:

  • the Europeana Foundation, with access to 2,200 + cultural institutions
  • Creative hubs and organizations that have access to the creative industries and professionals in the tourism and educational sectors in Europe
  • Living Labs in four countries (Spain, France, Finland and Belgium)
  • Technical and multimedia experts
  • Business planning experts
  • Partners who provide material from their cultural heritage institution or museum.

The full list of participants and more information about the project can be found on the Europeana Creative website.  Many thanks to Lizzy Komen for her original post which I borrowed heavily from!

Europeana Creative is a project co-funded by the European Commission under the CIP program 2007-2013.

We’re hiring!

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Volunteers and Historypin staff at Magic Me pinning session.

We’re excited to announce that we are recruiting two new positions on the Historypin Team:

Behind the scenes tours of the most venerable historical institutions of the world? Check. Pinning dusty old photos to a map in a pub and hearing the hilarious or heartbreaking stories behind them? Check.

Project Officers are responsible for supporting the delivery of our growing portfolio of Historypin Projects around the world. From liaising with stakeholders to running activities with local communities, you’ll be involved with innovative projects combining digital and on-the-ground engagement.

As part of our creative and dynamic team, Project Officers will also play an integral role in the development of Historypin. In particular they will be involved with the research, testing and refinement  of new toolsets for crowd-sourcing of historical content and collaborative storytelling.

If you’re passionate about cultural heritage and community engagement, read more about the roles and apply here:

Project Officer, London

Project Officer, San Francisco

Historypin Visits in Australia & New Zealand

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I know it’s a little last minute, but if you’re in Brisbane, Sydney, Perth or Auckland, we’d love to see you!

Brisbane, ALIA Information Online conference.  Wednesday 13 Feb, Jon Voss joins Roy Tennant and Ingrid Mason in keynote.  Friday 15 Feb, State Library of Queensland hosts Historypin walk in Brisbane CBD.

Sydney. Tuesday 19 Feb, Powerhouse Museum hosts Historypin user group and talk with Jon Voss. 10am-noon.  More details and free registration here.

Auckland. 21 Feb. Jon Voss giving a talk and meetup, details tbd.

Perth, early March. Rebekkah Abraham available for workshops and meetings, tbd.

Please contact Jon or Rebekkah directly if you’re interested in meeting up or hosting something at your institution.

 

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.

Historypin Repeats in the New York Times

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We were excited to see Historypin in the New York Times again today, this time in an article about websites utilizing time and place data to organize photos.  They featured a Historypin Repeat that I did with a favorite old photo of my dad at the Jefferson Memorial around 1949 when he was in school at the Theological College at Catholic University. I love being able to insert myself into history, and imagining the conversation I could have with my dad at that age.

In any case, you can read the article in the New York Times, and see that particular Repeat on Historypin.

Historypin heads to Brighton

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The Historypin Team is getting excited as next week we will be hitting the road and heading down to Brighton to take part in Our Digital Planet.

Created by the Nominet Trust, Our Digital Planet is an outdoor street gallery exhibition demonstrating the power the internet has to change our lives for the better.

We’ll be down on the Promenade on Wednesday 22nd August to show some of the ace photos that have been pinned and help you add your memories about Brighton. So come down and say hello, armed with photos and stories to add!

If you can’t wait until Wednesday, Our Digital Planet will be in town from Thursday 16th August until Monday 3rd September. There will be an outdoor street gallery exhibition showcasing 24 thought-provoking images of the social impact of the internet, and a drop-in internet station where you can chat to Nominet volunteers about how to get started online or get more out of using the internet. And don’t forget to check the timetable for other activities that you can get involved with during the week from folks like We’re Altogether Better, DigitalMe and Made with Jam.

Don’t live in Brighton? Don’t worry, Our Digital Planet will be hopping all over the UK over the next few months. To find out more about other locations and details about Brighton activities, visit their website.

Hope to see you on the 22nd!

Introducing our new CTO

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We’re very excited to introduce Mark Frost, who joins our London team as We Are What We Do’s new Chief Technical Officer.

Over the last few years, we’ve been lucky enough to have some fantastic developers, planners and designers come into the team and develop a stream of successful digital projects like Internet Buttons, the Action Tracker and, of course, Historypin. In June, we set out to find someone that could lead this team to the next stage of strategic development and high quality delivery. In July, we bumped in Mark and, just on Monday, he started as CTO.

Mark comes from a perfect background for We Are What We Do, learning his trade in Silicon Valley and making his way through top roles at AOL UK, the BBC and Capital Radio Group. Just as importantly, Mark is passionate about what we do and about using technology and creativity to create products that can change behaviours and affect major issues. Definitely more importantly, he has a whippet and makes his own olive oil.

We can’t wait to get stuck in with Mark. Historypin, in particular, has reached substantial scale and complexity and our other work, as it grows and evolves, demands the experience and confidence that he brings and which has already started to rub off on the team.

We’ll get Mark on stage shortly – he does a great Dock of the Bay – and in the meantime, have a read of his profile on our team page.

New iPhone app

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Our all-new iPhone app has just been released and is now available in the app store.

The app helps you discover windows into the past by seeing and interacting with the history all around you.

In the new version, we've completely redesigned the interface to make it more usable and enjoyable to use. Plus, you can also now explore Tours on your phone, walking you step-by-step through a series pieces of themed content pinned to a route on the map. You can also now watch and listen to video and audio clips which have been pinned.

The new app now also shows all users' Channels, so you can easily find everything uploaded and curated by individuals and institutions from around the world, including people like the US National Archives, Imperial War Museums and The English Heritage Archive. Everyone with a Channel on the Historypin site has a Channel on the app, so if you have a Channel, this app features your content!

The app keeps the core functionality it always had - revealing photos near your current location, allowing you to view them layered over the modern scene in front of you, exploring Collections of some of the best old photos from around the world and adding your own content to Historypin by using your phone to digitise an old photo, capture a modern moment of historic importance, or take a modern replica of a photo on the app.

And of course it still has everyone's favourite feature: where if you shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it like polaroid picture, your phone will bring up a random awesome old photo.

Hope you like it.

Historypin named one of the best Family History Websites!

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Historypin has been named one of the 101 Best Family History Websites by Family Tree Magazine! You can find us in the Old Photos and Maps section alongside some other neat historical sites.

To celebrate, here are a few of great Pinners who have been sharing their family history on Historypin:

Geoff Drew – Geoff has added an amazing 100 photos that trace his family over 100 years, with pins as far apart as Devon in the UK and Queensland in Australia.

The Richeys – An exploration of family history in NYC, USA

A Sentimental Journey - J.G. Repshire’s mission to chronicle the life and family of Harold Rea during the Great Depression and World War Two.

EastMarple1 – Some great family snaps here, including the one that features on EastMarple’s banner.

Have you got photos of your Grandad’s first car? Your Grandma’s wedding? Add them to our Grandparents Collection.

Pin your Olympic Memories!

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Athletics at the 1st Olympiad in 1896

The Games are about to begin and we’ve launched our Olympic Memory Collection to collect the amazing photos, videos and stories from previous Olympiads and from this year’s extravaganza in London.

Browse the map to explore photos from every Olympics since the first in one way back in 1896. Some highlights include the 10 Mile Walk in 1908 (don’t forget your top hat if you’re an official), Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Games and Usain Bolt winning gold at the 2008 Olympics.

Over the decades there have been some very amusing outfits (from athletes and fans!) and some unusual events. Have a flick through our Weird and Wonderful Collection to see some of our faves.

Been watching the Olympic flame travel around the UK? Take a Tour and follow the 1948 Torch Relay which only visited a dozen places in before the Austerity Games.

Slide through our timeline for a potted history of the Olympic Games featuring some little known facts and fun photos.

Are you a teacher or youth worker looking for activities? Download our free activities pack which includes a game, lesson plans and tipsheets for gathering photos.

Have you got photos and memories of previous Olympics? A snap of the Torch passing through your area? Add them to our Collection.

And if you’re lucky enough to be going to this years sporting extravaganza, don’t forget to add your images, videos and stories!