Briefly Noted

Some things that I wish I had more time to explore:

• Memento is an experimental "time machine right in your web browser . . . [to] . . . explore content from a date in the past" according to the Library of Congress.
  
• Google Earth 6 is turning heads (see above)with its scary-good integration of street view into the virtual world. But not all the street views available in Google Maps show up in Earth yet.
  
• Building on Google Earth 6, HistoryPin allows you to "pin your history to the world" by inserting historic photographs into the street view. I am so going to do this with a class.
  
• Did you see where the FCC came out today with a very strong statement of support for net neutrality? Change I can believe in.
  
• ...and I have been meaning to tell you all that my employer, the Washington State Archives, Digital Archives, is tweeting. I mostly write the tweets, and so far they have focused on exploring the 92 million digital objects in our collection. I may be a while. Follow us here.

Longest Drives in Google Maps

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Alan Taylor: I set out to find the longest distance for which Google Maps would give Driving Directions. Now that they've shut down the fun "swim the Atlantic" feature, things have changed a bit. It turns out there are multiple "longest drives", because the Google Maps World is partitioned (many countries don't support driving directions), and sometimes ferries are included, and sometimes they are not.

I am not sure what this does for us, it is just kind of neat.

Coeur d'Alene Native Names Project

"The Native Names Project: In September of 2005 the United States Geologic Survey (USGS) funded the Coeur d'Alene Tribe’s Cooperative Agreements Program (CAP) grant to supply Native American place names to the National Map . . . One of the most important things about this project is preserving the individual stories and pronunciations of the places. On many reservations across the United States it is the unfortunate truth that only a handful of the people know the native geographic names. The goal of this project is to collect these place names before they disappear forever." (Above is Hangman Creek, known to the Coeur d'Alenes as "Suckers in the Water.")

You can see the Coeur d'Alene names for many sites in Washington, Idaho and Montana on this flash based map. (Which actually is not loading for me this evening--check back.) Or more fun yet, download the Google Earth KMZ file. Here is what a section of the Google Earth file looks like:
Clicking on the icons brings a pop-up window with the native and Euroamerican names and a link to "site report" page with includes an MP3 of the native pronunciation and in some cases a streaming video of Couer d'Alene elder Felix Aripa explaining the meaning of the name and the location. Here is Aripa explaining how his people called the area around Sprague Lake "Smell smell." Here is another article on the names project.

This is a wonderful combination of native tradition and modern technology. And it points the way towards other neat things one might do with oral history and Google Earth, mapping peoples memories of one room school houses, or CC camps or the like.

(This post via Metafilter.)

Visualizing Man's Impact on the Oceans

A Global Map of Human Impacts to Marine Ecosystems: "The goal of the research presented here is to estimate and visualize, for the first time, the global impact humans are having on the ocean's ecosystems. Our analysis, published in Science, February 15, 2008, shows that over 40% of the world's oceans are heavily affected by human activities and few if any areas remain untouched."

This report is from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), which "supports cross-disciplinary research that uses existing data to address major fundamental issues in ecology and allied fields, and their application to management and policy." What makes me post it here is the innovative way the NCEAS presents its data as a Google Earth layer. Here is the KML file: Marine Impacts KML.

(via MetaFilter)

The Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay

During the first world war, Woodrow Wilson authorized a crash program to produce wooden steamships to ferry supplies to the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. Over 700 ships were authorized but less than 100 built by the war's end. Yet the program continued for several more years, producing hundreds of leaky, inefficient, and unwanted vessels before Congress cut off funding. Eventually over 150 of the ships were towed to Mallows Bay on a remote section of the Potomac. Many were burned to the waterline and the rest slowly sank into the shallow water. Over 100 years later, their outlines are clearly visible from the air, as you can see on Google Maps. (Note: This post is shamelessly stolen from this great post at Metafilter, which contains links to other goodies like some kayaker's pictures of the wrecks). I recently used this in class and was rewarded with a collective gasp from the students as they saw the outlines of the wrecks come into view!

So what long-gone historical landmarks in the Northwest are still visible (or only visible) from the air and discoverable through Google Maps and similar services? I don't have time to hunt any down right now but possibilities include the Mullan Road, old railroad cuts, sunken docks and other facilities (a quick look at Seattle on Google Maps reveals some suggestive structures under the water). The problem however, as is so often the case with Google Maps, is that the resolution of the photos for much of the mountain west is very poor. (I was at a Google Earth teacher workshop at Eastern Washington University earlier this year. While the teachers from Spokane ooh-ed and aah-ed as they picked out their own cars in their driveways, the teachers from little towns like Republic and Usk stared at the pixellated blur on their screens and cursed their fate.)

Google is constantly updating and improving the resolutions avaialble. But currently the most promising use of this technology at present is to look for signs of history in the places Google cares about the most. Can anyone think of possble histori relics near Hood River?