Category Archives: Projects

Dan Rademacher of Bay Nature Magazine On Our Year of the Bay Photo Contest

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Historypin is teaming up with Bay Nature magazine on a photo contest for our Year of the Bay crowdsourcing project, and here editor Dan Rademacher tells us more about how you can help contribute. —

Fun in San Francisco Bay by Ian Ransley Design + Illustration

Get your images published in Bay Nature magazine, win $50, and help crowdsource the history of San Francisco Bay. All at once!

What’s your favorite place to have fun on San Francisco Bay? Is it Crissy Field? Crown Beach? China Camp? Candlestick Point? Coyote Point?

What’s your favorite way to have fun on San Francisco Bay? By boat, kayak, or kiteboard. On foot or by bike. With binoculars at dawn, or on a picnic blanket on a lazy afternoon.

I’m the editor of Bay Nature magazine and we’ve been telling stories of the San Francisco Bay since 2001. Sometimes, those stories are serious—decades-long wetlands restoration projects, worrisome sea-level rise projections, historic losses of habitat or influxes of Gold Rush sediments.

And sometimes those stories are seriously fun, and that’s what we’re after this time!

So we’ve teamed up with yearofthebay.org on a photo contest, and we want your photos of people having fun on the Bay. We want your recent photos, your old photos, your fine photos, your quirky photos, scans of those old snapshots your oddball uncle left you in his will. We want ‘em all!

Why? Because we ALL make history, and we want to see a whole range of folks having fun out on San Francisco Bay — kayaking, fishing, swimming, sailing, stand-up paddling, playing with their dogs, kite-boarding, wind-surfing, motor boating, and, yes, maybe even sitting on the dock of the Bay, killing time.

These photos will become part of the Year of the Bay’s communally produced Bay history, and they’ll also be a key part of Bay Nature’s July-September 2013 issue, along with a chronicle of the recent history of major Bay wetlands restoration and otherworldly portraits of a few of the millions of tiny creatures that flow under the Golden Gate Bridge every day.

Tiny larval crabs riding the tides, shorebirds nesting in South Bay marshes, families picnicking on the beach—it’s all part of the story of San Francisco Bay, that great wilderness at the heart of our region.

We’ll choose up to eight images to publish in our July-September 2013 issue. Winners get $50 per image, plus of course photo credit and complimentary copies of the magazine.

Only two rules: (1) The photo must be of people in, on, or right next to SF Bay, and (2) they should be having fun!

So help us tell the Bay’s story by submitting your photos at baynature.org/bay-photo-contest. Submissions are due bymidnight on May 12, 2013.

Visit our Year of the Bay page anytime to explore how we are helping to crowdsource the history of San Francisco Bay.

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.

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.

Life Story Challenge Launches!

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Life Story Challenge HistorypinWho do you know who is amazing? Someone interesting, kind, worthwhile, brave, crazy, amazing, selfless, or generous and who is continuing living life to the full – an “Active Ager”?

The Life Story Challenge is now open for entries from anyone in Europe!

Simply create a Life Story about someone you know using photos and stories you’ve collected and tell the story of their life and what they are doing now.

The best story will win a cash prize and a trip to Brussels. But get in quick if you want a chance to win - the closing date is 16th September 2012.

The Life Story Challenge has been created by Historypin and the European Year for Active Ageing to celebrate the Year of Active Ageing and Intergenerational Solidarity.

Find our more and get started creating your Life Story here.