Charlotte Goodhart

Role: Intern

Why did you want to intern at Historypin?
It manages to amalgamate some of my favourite things: the internet, old photos and social history.  I’m very nosey ,I love knowing about peoples lives, families, history etc so when I found out about Historypin it was a sort-of BINGO there goes my social life I shall forever be stuck inside browsing this website moment.

How did you come to hear of the project?
I initially heard about it through some friends but I really got into it when I was making a channel for the Jewish Community Centre for London about the Jewish East End (please do have a look here: http://www.historypin.com/channels/view/16144102/) 

Describe an average day for you as a Historypin Intern
It’s a bit of a mixture, the first thing I usually do is check the social media stuff and select a pin of the day..this can take a surprisingly long time! Then I might do a bit of research for an upcoming project or type up some notes for a previous project

What do you do when you’re not at Historypin?
Mostly watch Eastenders, but I’m also studying part time for an MA in Museum Studies at UCL and working in marketing.

What’s been your best moment here?
I’ve really enjoyed having control of the social media pages and interacting with people, we get some really sweet messages so it’s nice to read them and see how happy the website makes a lot of people. 

What is the oddest job you’ve been asked to do in the name of Historypin?
Hmm..some of the stories given by people who’ve been interviewed for the Remember How We Used To project are pretty hilarious, lots of old guys reminiscing about their childhood – they’re not odd but they are very funny

What excites you the most about Historypin?
I love that its completely open and accessible to anyone.  Plus I’m excited by the fact that it’s very easy to use and so anybody, with any story to tell can get onboard.

Can you show us a photo you have personally pinned on Historypin?

I love this photo, Emanuel Litvinoff is one of my favourite authors so a few years I wrote on his facebook page saying how much I enjoyed one of his books (Journey Through a Small Planet) – his son who maintained the page sent me a message to say thanks and also that he thought I was probably one of the only people under 50 who’d read it.  In 2011 Emanuel sadly passed away.  When I started the project for the JCC I messaged Aaron asking if he had any photos of his dad (who was born to a Jewish immigrant family and grew up around Spitalfields) and he sent me this straight away.  I just think it’s so cool: Emanuel is back in his home streets, just hanging out, looking so sharp in this beautiful suit.  I love the Asian guy walking past too.  To me this photo  perfectly sums up Brick Lane and the East End as a place.  Also, the composure, the light, the content, everything, it’s beautiful.

What’s your favourite photo that has been pinned to Historypin and why?
I can’t pick one but I am a bit obsessed with the Saint Michael’s College Archive channel – they have beautiful, interesting pictures uploaded weekly.

The photo featured was a great snap from the US Library of Congress of a conga line outside the White House to celebrate the end of World War Two:

V-J day: Dancing on the White House lawn, August 1945, shared by US Library of Congress

]]> http://blog.historypin.com/2013/06/14/historypin-gets-a-spot-in-googles-1-million-maps-video/feed/ 0 http://blog.historypin.com/2013/06/12/our-year-of-the-bay-hackathon-at-the-california-historical-society/ http://blog.historypin.com/2013/06/12/our-year-of-the-bay-hackathon-at-the-california-historical-society/#comments Wed, 12 Jun 2013 20:49:18 +0000 Kerri http://blog.historypin.com/?p=3397 Continue reading →]]>

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.

Being a Historypinner in London can be surprisingly difficult. Over the last century, hundreds of streets have had their names changed, been moved or been totally destroyed and rebuilt in a new formation.

There’s nothing more frustrating than sourcing some great photos with fascinating stories then getting home and discovering that the address given doesn’t appear to exist anymore. Then there is that moment of total despair when Google doesn’t instantly produce the results you need, but fortunately there are some solutions.

My first piece of advice is to persevere! Abandon Google Maps straightaway because it won’t recognise older street names, start looking instead on message boards and forums. The Internet has given rise to hundreds of local history forums where people share their memories of where they grew up. There are also lots of amateur genealogists searching for information about their ancestors or even people just looking for old friends. These sites are an invaluable source and so far I’ve been able to find the new location of every single disappeared street I’ve come across. One that I used a lot was a group about the Jewish East End on Facebook but for more general use, British Genealogy has some good forums. Most boroughs have home made pages as well, but there are sites that cover the entirety of London, such as Move That, which whilst not originally intended to be, has become a hotspot for people seeking out streets and relatives in different areas of the capital.

Just five minutes in London is enough time to witness the massive architectural diversity of the city. One of the spaces where this is most evident is the City of London (the Square Mile) where higgledy-piggledy streets not wide enough for cars lead on to roads lined with enormous modern office blocks.

Even out in the suburbs it’s common to find a road of identical Victorian semi-detached houses neighbouring a Brutalist tower block that in turn neighbours simple new-build flats or houses.

In some ways this is the beauty of London; its’ a space for constant reinvention and rebuilding and is endlessly changing. Just ask your grandparents their thoughts on the area that you live in now (especially if you live in east London). The city may lack the simplicity of the tourist-friendly American grid system, but there is something quite charming about the winding lanes and strange combinations of buildings.

London has never experienced a period of massive redevelopment nor was it originally built based on a plan, in the way that some cities like Paris and New York were. Instead the city has grown organically over almost two thousand years and the layers of different cultures and building styles are visible evidence of the rich history of the city.

A century of mass destruction and redevelopment, as a result of slum clearance and the Second World War, has left swathes of London unrecognisable from its past condition. As a result this has led to the disappearance of many streets and place names, something that creates quite a big problem for historypinners.

I first came across this issue whilst creating a channel for the Jewish Community Centre for London, which mapped the history of the East End (you can read my blog about it here and see our channel here). A number of people gave us photographs with addresses where they or their parents or Grandparents had lived, which when I searched for no longer existed.

One of these is Dorset Street, in Spitalfields. Known at the time as ‘the worst street in London’ (there seems to be a ‘worst street’ for each quarter of London, with this one being the absolute worst of them all). According to a newspaper article from 1901 the street boasted an enormously high monthly murder rate and was even avoided by ‘the aristocrats of crime’. Instead the lower criminal classes, including ‘the common thief’, frequented it. Untouched by police who feared the area, it also apparently had absolutely no female residents who were not employed in the sex trade.¹

Dorset Street, in Spitalfields

From the 1920s onwards, the local authorities pursued a strong policy of slum clearance, for reasons of sanitation but also undoubtedly in a bid to rid the area of its seedy culture. Today there are a few commercial buildings, some quite naff amateur graffiti and a large car park on the site. Nothing remains that hints at its rather sordid history.

White's Row today (Google Street View)

Meanwhile, another rival for the title of ‘Worst Street’ can be found north, in Finsbury Park not far from the tube station. Campbell Road was infamous at the time and rumour has it that applying for a job with this address as your home instantly disqualified you! A local newspaper article, written in 1928 described the daily presence of a resident from the road at the North London Court. The street was also isolated from its neighbours who were still seen as working class, but were considered far more respectable.²

It was demolished in the late 1960s or the early 1970s and replaced by Biggerstaff Street and Haden Court, the latter being at one point apparently home to a young Johnny Rotten and his parents.

School girls using computers, 1987. Pinned by Mirrorpix Archives.

Self-improvement is very important to us here at Historypin, and this month we’re working on developing new tools and refining current ones on our website. We couldn’t do it without you though, so we’re looking for some eager participants who would like to come in to the office, have a cuppa and test some current and new features on the Historypin website with one of our team members.

We’re looking for people who are fairly new to Historypin, so if you’re a long-time user, introduce us to one of your friends or family members and come along! We’d love to meet you and send you both home with some swag that includes some of our We Are What We Do stationery ( http://shop.wearewhatwedo.org/stationeryrange/ ), Historypin stickers and postcards.

If you’d like to participate, please fill out our contact form here and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible!

Click here for contact form

Some info:

Who?

We have limited spaces for participants so we’ll contact people in the order that they respond. We are looking for relatively new users to Historypin, but if you’ve been following Historypin for awhile and forward this post to someone new, we’d love to meet both of you.

What?

Participants will get a sneak peak at new features to the Historypin website and give direct input on how they can be refined. We’ll ask you to test a few simple tasks using new/existing tools and ask that you to share your experience.

Where?

We’ll be working out of our London office, so apologies for those who aren’t local. More details on the location will be sent out when we start contacting participants.

When?
Once we start receiving participation requests, we’ll start sending out specific times and dates for you to choose from. We are looking for people on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays during the daytime.

How?

It will be a completely painless process – promise! We will need approximately 1 ½ hour of your time and you’re welcome to withdraw at any time. This would include a short interview, a set of tasks involving tools on the Historypin website, and a brief exit questionnaire. And, don’t forget about that cuppa.

To commemorate this momentous event, in partnership with Europeana, we are launching the 1989 Project to help gather the many personal stories, photos, videos, audio clips and documents that chronicle the events of 1989.

Were you there? Do you have a memory of events in central and eastern Europe? If so, we’d love you to add them to the project, directly via the site.

So far, over 6,000 photos and memories have been shared, capturing events in Germany from May 1989 to December 1990 as the process of re-unification began. These have been shared by Deutsche Kinemathek and were collected as part of the Wie Waren So Frei (Moments in Time) project.

Europeana is a digital portal which provides access to more than 25 million digitized objects of cultural heritage from European libraries, archives and museums. They also run collection days to gather and preserve personal artifacts from Europe’s citizens.

The Europeana team will be travelling around central and eastern Europe running collection days where you can bring in your photos, documents, video and audio clips to be digitised and added to the archive for preservation and discovery. To find out about upcoming events and find one near you, take a look at their calendar of events.

To find out more about Europeana and their activities to collect 1989 stories, explore their blog.

Explore the 1989 Project.

Historypin: Broadcasting to the World. Photo: Exterior view of KMPC. Shared by Los Angeles Public Library

We’re proud to report that Historypin is growing by leaps and bounds.  Back in February, the Milwaukee County Historical Society became our 1000th institutional member, with that number already approaching 1200.  Our institutional members include community groups, school groups, commercial archives, and cultural heritage institutions like libraries, archives and museums.  Meanwhile, our members have pinned over 250,000 materials and memories, and we now have more than 47,000 individual members.  As we grow, we’re making changes to our Terms and Conditions to ensure that the amazing content that is being shared on Historypin will reach the widest possible audience.

What has changed, exactly?

We simplified and clarified Section 12 of our Terms and Conditions, the section pertaining to “Contributed Content.”  The biggest changes are that descriptive information about your content (dates, titles, locations, copyright and licensing information), will be made available to the public under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication; and Text Content (like comments and stories) will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

What in the world does that mean?

The bottom line is that your content is your content, Historypin does not assume any ownership or copyright over your content.  These changes to our Terms and Conditions makes no change in regard to your Media Content (your photos, videos, audio)–you choose the licensing you’d like to use.

Your Text Content, like comments and stories, can be used and cited by anyone, as long as they attribute you as the author and if they make any alterations to it, they must also use the same or similar license.  The main purpose of this is to allow cultural heritage institutions to use your contributions to further enhance their records.  Suppose you found a WWI photo that your grandfather was in, and you shared a story that your grandfather told you about it.  The musuem that posted the photo would be able to use or publish that story, attributing you as the author, to enrich their information about the photo.

Andrew Jorgen Karlson of Karlson Machine Works, Phoenix Arizona c1945. Shared by LevineMachineLLC.

Descriptive information about your photos, videos or audio (aka Content Metadata) can help other people find your contributions. This metadata is largely factual and descriptive, like a date, location, camera angle, copyright licence, etc.).  We will be making this available to the public and to search engines in a number of ways and this information can be shared and distributed by pretty much anyone without limitations. This allows people to find content in new ways. For instance, someone may create a list of all of the photos containing hats in Historypin, including links on where to find these images and who published them.  They, in turn, may add to the information, breaking it down into different types: Bowler, Bollinger, Bandino, etc., and publish that data.  The Next thing you know, a costume designer is checking out your photo on Historypin to research Norwegian immigrant machinists in Arizona in the 1940s.

Why is Historypin making these changes?

Good question.  There are several reasons.

1.  Historypin is a non-profit project dedicated to the sharing and discovery of historical content, and fostering community around local history.  We want the content and conversations to be shared as widely as possible for the maximum good.  We’d like to improve, diversify, and enrich the holdings of cultural heritage institutions around the world. We want your content and stories to be discovered now, and hundreds of years from now.  These changes help us to do this.

2. We’re moving toward using a variety of technologies to improve the way people, programmers, and machines interact with Historypin data.  These changes will encourage new and creative ways to contribute to and discover the stories of local history.

3. We’re working within a global ecosystem of cultural heritage content and actively participating in conversations about the best ways for sharing information, legally and technically. These changes help us synchronize with global projects like Wikipedia, Europeana, and the Digital Public Library of America.

What if I don’t want my data shared this way?

You’re free to remove your content from Historypin at any time.

And what if I do?

We were hoping you’d ask.  If you do want to participate, then just keep on sharing on Historypin and we’ve got all kinds of exciting new things coming your way…

その計画を日本からスタートします。東京のブリティッシュ・カウンシルと共に、日本のパートナーと連携しに計画を始動しました。そして、今回、ブリティッシュ・カウンシルの協力により、一週間日本に滞在し、トークイベントやミーティング、そして地域でのフィールドトリップなどを行います。

日本でのプロジェクトを通して、文化、コミュニティー、テクノロジーなど様々な分野の人々とコラボレーションをする機会に恵まれ、とてもわくわくしています。様々な活動を通して認知症の人々を支援する取り組みも行っている富士通研究所とは、すでによい関係を構築しています。今回の来日を通して、さらに多くの人々と出会えることと楽しみにしています。

日本滞在中のイベントやトークなどの活動については、ツイッター（@nickstanhope）にて日本語と英語の2か国語でお知らせします。お楽しみに！

Historypin comes to Japan

Historypin has been growing all around the world over the last 12 months, with rich, fascinating projects starting up in places as far afield as Ulyanovsk, Cape Town and Taiwan. As we try and do more to foster and support these projects globally, we’re also working in a few key areas to plan substantial localisation and launch activity.

Japan is first on this list and we have been lucky enough to start working with a group of fantastic partners through the British Council in Tokyo. We’ve been really inspired by the British Council team’s support for our work and energy in organising a week of presentations, planning sessions and community visits.

We’re excited about the chance to work with organisations from across lots of different sectors, from culture to community to technology. We’ve already started developing a strong relationship with Fujitsu Laboratories who are close companions in the way they have brought together their several activities with a commitment to supporting people with dementia. We look forward to exploring that and many other opportunities with local organisations.

If you’d like to know more about the specific events and talks, I’ll be tweeting everything that’s going on (@nickstanhope) in English and Japanese.

You can explore Historypin in Japanese here.

We hope you’ll join us to share your own stories:, set up a school or local community project to gather content, or add institutional collections to the Hurricane Sandy Project.

Every year, natural disasters wreak havoc on communities around the world, and it can take months, years and even decades for infrastructure and homes to be rebuilt. Lives are lost and disrupted and permanent scars are recorded and remembered in family and neighborhood history for generations.

Seven months after Hurricane Sandy swept over the Caribbean and up the Eastern seaboard of the United States, communities are still rebuilding in its wake. The deadliest and most destructive hurricane of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season, Sandy left at least 285 people dead across seven countries, with additional material damages of over $75 billion.

Today, Google unveiled new Street View imagery for several locations affected by Hurricane Sandy, underlining the importance of shared community content to connect and remember.

Nick Stanhope, CEO of We Are What We Do (the creators of Historypin), and Executive Director of Historypin, said, “These communities have shown amazing resilience since Hurricane Sandy and we’ve been working with lots of local partners to set up a way for people to remember, share and sustain that process.

We already know that people will use it in many different ways, from practical recreations of pre-storm streets to support ongoing efforts to rebuild through to local stories of neighborhoods coming together during Sandy for mutual support.”

Jason Kucsma, Executive Director of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, added, “Many libraries suffered severe damage from Hurricane Sandy, but that didn’t stop them from continuing to be lifelines for their communities. Libraries throughout the city, despite being heavily impacted by the storm, rolled out relief services to provide communities with food, water, clothing, internet, and perhaps most importantly, authoritative information about the recovery process.” Many of these libraries are now beginning to help collect and preserve media content related to Sandy.

Archives play a central role in long term preservation, helping to examine the past records of disasters and preserve records in the aftermath of new ones. The Society of American Archivists is reaching out to their membership to facilitate participation in this project.

“We’re especially delighted to be working with Historypin, Google, and others to document the impact of Hurricane Sandy,” said Society of American Archivists President Jackie Dooley. “This collaboration matches Historypin’s unique capacity to build community around local history with archivists’ compelling interest in ensuring the completeness, diversity, and accessibility of the historical record. Good things will result from working together!”

Sayer's Wharf, Newport RI, flooded after Hurricane Sandy. Shared by Newport Historical Society on Historypin

Local historical societies give us a unique perspective on the patterns of natural disasters. The Newport Historical Society, for example, has shared photos of Sandy and other hurricanes reaching back to 1938, documenting the way people have come together to help one another again and again.

“It is very important for our nation’s history organizations to participate in projects like this,” said Terry Davis, President and CEO of the America Association of State and Local History. “When a national disaster strikes our country, the power of history plays a crucial role in the cultural preservation and long term recovery of devastated communities. As keepers of our nation’s history, we hold the records and memories of state and local history. AASLH strongly encourages history organizations with connections to the areas affected by Hurricane Sandy to contribute to this important project so that history is not lost forever.”

You can view the project, explore memories of Sandy and make your own contributions at http://historypin.com/sandy. If you need help getting started with sharing your content, please see our how to guides and videos.