Historypin is a simple web-based mapping tool designed to facilitate crowdsourced citizen histories and community-driven archiving projects. It was born from a 2011 partnership between Google and Shift Design, a UK-based nonprofit organization. Shift’s goal in launching Historypin was to facilitate “volunteer led community projects… [to] increase local social capital and reduce social isolation.”1Since then, Historypin has grown to accommodate over 400,000 individual photographs, sound clips, and videos, uploaded and georeferenced by 2,000+ cultural heritage institutions and 60,000+ individual contributors.
The result is a highly interactive multimedia map of the world and its audiovisual historical documents. Users may visually browse the media connected to a particular geographic location, narrowing results by timespan if desired—or users may instead browse the curated collections created by individuals or institutions, allowing in-depth research into a particular information source or historical event.
Example Applications
Historypin’s “Projects” pagefeatures mapmaking ventures large and small, institutional or amateur; some of these projects have been further aggregated into thematic collections, as in First World War Centenary, the collection highlighting geospatial histories of World War I in the wake of the war’s recent centennial.
Historypin flourishes as a vehicle for community archive projects, in which amateurs are solicited to share their photographs, videos, and oral histories pertaining to a given theme within a geographic area. Examples include California Pride, a crowdsourced multimedia history of the LGBTQ community throughout California, and Sourdough and Rye, a similar history aimed at capturing the Jewish history of the San Francisco Bay area.