Anything Happening with History Pin?

[masterblaster]

I am wondering if anything is happening with History Pin as it is more than 5 years since the last posting here?

Having been in on the Beta testing with Ella before it went public I have an affinity with the project and its original concept which might well work again.

Hope all are keeping well in these strange times!

Mike Strange

[Tori Flower]

Hi Mike

Tori here, I've met you before with Ella and remember your support of HIstorypin since the early days. 

HIstorypin transferred to being run out of the US office, who are now separating off as a separate entity. Jon Voss (who's been involved in Historypin basically from the start) is heading that up. I've CCed him so he can let you know what's going on.

Hope you are well

Tori

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[Morseman]

I'm in the process of sorting through my groups and have bookmarked the Historypin website at https://www.historypin.org/en/ but I wonder if it is worth remaining on this group now?

Thanks - Dave

[Jon Voss]

Hi Dave,

We still monitor it, but there hasn’t been much activity and we rarely post here. That being said, I’m happy to announce that we did receive a $375k grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to redevelop the Historypin site in 2021. You can read about that here.

Thanks! Jon

Jon Voss
---------------------------------------------
Historypin

(504) 383-4652
Skype: jonevoss
Twitter: @jonvoss
historypin.org 

Historypin is now a part of Shift Collective!

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/historypin/208e0f19-b6c4-437b-9097-53b0624791ccn%40googlegroups.com.

[robin aka georgiawebgurl]

I'm curious as well. 

Robin / @georgiawebgurl

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/historypin/208e0f19-b6c4-437b-9097-53b0624791ccn%40googlegroups.com.

[masterblaster]

Jon,

I have read the 48 page paper that is referenced in your link. It has left me wondering if there is any room left for the invidual contribution and concepts that formed the basis for History Pin. There is mention of gaining feedback from users; I presume they were corporate users rather than individuals as I have maintained contact since the beta testing I took part in and never seen a request for comment since those early days.  For me the impetus was lost for when the big image archives were swamping the small contributions with bulk uploading of images with little or no details of the history behind the image, its date and often just a generalised placing on the maps. Along with that kind of activity the drive to keep it alive and relevant by the team disappeared.  A guess a great many opportunities to get teenagers to sit and talk with granny with her box full of photo from her younger days and place them on History PIn have been lost and will not happen again; very sad.

Mike.

[robin aka georgiawebgurl]

I think that is an interesting point - the contextual information provided through the metadata. Having worked on digital archives & history projects, the quality of information about each item really varies, even with large consortial projects with best practices and descriptive metadata standards.

Good luck with the redesign... ah, personas, the hot topic in UX... 

Robin Fay / @georgiawebgurl

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/historypin/5d5651e2-e42a-4605-95da-0ec21d946c06n%40googlegroups.com.

[Jon Voss]

Hi folks,

Thanks for your thoughts here Mike and Robin. We’re very much overdue for some kind of annual report. This will have to do for now...

Just a quick note on this Google Group, it’s been around since 2011 when we first publicly launched Historypin. It has 107 members and the most recent non-employee joined in 2016. There were two threads on it this year, before that was 2015. So it’s not active, to say the least. These days, we probably use Twitter more than anything else for public communications, and we haven’t been very active there lately either, in part due to shoestring budgets.

There’s no question Historypin has changed quite a bit in 10 years. The (US) National Endowment for the Humanities funding that will support the next build is indicative of that. You’re quite right Mike that we’ve focused much more on organizational partnerships rather than individual users. One reason for that is costs: this is a free platform so those individuals don’t help sustain the costs of the projects. Another is logistics: it takes time and effort to engage individual users and we’ve found over the years that it doesn’t make sense for us to do that directly when there are hundreds of thousands of organizations around the world that are already doing that outreach, training, and person-to-person connecting. Our organization has evolved to support those organizations, and also sustain the technology and free-to-use platform on a combination of grants and project-based income. 

Our last major project in the UK wound down in 2019, Kings Cross Story Palace, which was very much a deep dive into the stories and photos of the many intersecting communities of Kings Cross, London. It also experimented with story telling not tied to maps, building off of our extensive work on Storybox, a story-sharing platform about connecting individuals without the emphasis on photos or maps.

Other examples of major projects we worked on that enabled organizations to help get teens and elders together to share stories of the past are highlighted in these case studies, which are just a few examples. They include over 900 libraries across Colombia facilitating thousands of events and sharing over 10k photos on Historypin. Earlier this year, a university in Israel has helped us launch Historypin in Hebrew and Arabic, and are exploring neighborhood history through the lens of multiple generations and ethnicities. A university in Charlotte, North Carolina has been bringing their archives to life in a rapidly gentrifying African American community, and using Historypin to record and tell the stories of people who have been excluded from the dominant narrative there. The Manitos Community Memory project in northern New Mexico has been focusing exactly on how to go from shoebox to community storytelling, and we have helped them raise over $1m to support that effort. The list goes on and on, though we certainly need to do more to promote these stories, as you would have no way of knowing about them just by going to the Historypin site.

Many of the people working on these projects and several enthusiasts and individuals made up our Digital Humanities Advisory Panel who advised on how we can improve Historypin. We did make a public call for participants, and my apologies if we did not reach you through the social media channels we used about two years ago for that recruitment effort. All of the people on the panel represent themselves, their non-profit organizations, or academic institutions (none of them are for-profit corporate entities).  

I’ll leave you with a link to Millie’s collection, someone who has been working hard to share her personal photos and tell the story of her parents, refugees from Siberia who settled in Melbourne, Australia following WWII. 

Thanks again for your continued support of Historypin. I welcome your input and involvement, and we always welcome your donations as well to keep the platform free for anyone to use.

Wishing you all the very best in 2021,

Jon

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/historypin/CADw6bbvrqWXZ0xJ1GGqFiLi6UFTufOhocYgT%2Bk9yyrJ0PohhPg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Vahur Puik]

Hi! 

I sent a public query to Jon yesterday, but it seems it did not go through as I did not use the email address I'm enrolled to the googlegroup with. So a new try:

On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 12:47 PM Vahur Puik <va...@ajapaik.ee> wrote:

Hi everybody!

The Historypin redesign public white paper was a very interesting read. 

I am also interested in the appendices mentioned but not included in the white paper – User Interviews/Personas report and Historypin Sitemap & User Flow – could these also be shared here on this group or if not I'd like to receive these in a private email.

Historypin analogue Pastvu.com that probably is the biggest (by usage numbers – 583k monthly according to SimilarWeb) platform with mostly Russian audience went open source a year ago. It's interesting you don't mention this site in your report...

Ajapaik.ee – the platform I'm the manager of – has been open source since the beginning. In 2020 we had 149,918 users, 238,556 sessions, 1,478,093 pageviews, with an avg. session duration or 00:03:33, 75 % of the users are from Estonia, 12 % from Finland.

Almost everything in the Historypin User Feedback Report is also valid/applicable to our platform. In addition to web app we also have an android application dedicated to rephotography (Ajapaik users have made almost 20k rephotos).

With best

Vahur Puik

On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 8:48 PM Jon Voss <jon....@historypin.org> wrote:

Hi folks,

Thanks for your thoughts here Mike and Robin. We’re very much overdue for some kind of annual report. This will have to do for now...

Just a quick note on this Google Group, it’s been around since 2011 when we first publicly launched Historypin. It has 107 members and the most recent non-employee joined in 2016. There were two threads on it this year, before that was 2015. So it’s not active, to say the least. These days, we probably use Twitter more than anything else for public communications, and we haven’t been very active there lately either, in part due to shoestring budgets.

There’s no question Historypin has changed quite a bit in 10 years. The (US) National Endowment for the Humanities funding that will support the next build is indicative of that. You’re quite right Mike that we’ve focused much more on organizational partnerships rather than individual users. One reason for that is costs: this is a free platform so those individuals don’t help sustain the costs of the projects. Another is logistics: it takes time and effort to engage individual users and we’ve found over the years that it doesn’t make sense for us to do that directly when there are hundreds of thousands of organizations around the world that are already doing that outreach, training, and person-to-person connecting. Our organization has evolved to support those organizations, and also sustain the technology and free-to-use platform on a combination of grants and project-based income. 

Our last major project in the UK wound down in 2019, Kings Cross Story Palace, which was very much a deep dive into the stories and photos of the many intersecting communities of Kings Cross, London. It also experimented with story telling not tied to maps, building off of our extensive work on Storybox, a story-sharing platform about connecting individuals without the emphasis on photos or maps.

Other examples of major projects we worked on that enabled organizations to help get teens and elders together to share stories of the past are highlighted in these case studies, which are just a few examples. They include over 900 libraries across Colombia facilitating thousands of events and sharing over 10k photos on Historypin. Earlier this year, a university in Israel has helped us launch Historypin in Hebrew and Arabic, and are exploring neighborhood history through the lens of multiple generations and ethnicities. A university in Charlotte, North Carolina has been bringing their archives to life in a rapidly gentrifying African American community, and using Historypin to record and tell the stories of people who have been excluded from the dominant narrative there. The Manitos Community Memory project in northern New Mexico has been focusing exactly on how to go from shoebox to community storytelling, and we have helped them raise over $1m to support that effort. The list goes on and on, though we certainly need to do more to promote these stories, as you would have no way of knowing about them just by going to the Historypin site.

Many of the people working on these projects and several enthusiasts and individuals made up our Digital Humanities Advisory Panel who advised on how we can improve Historypin. We did make a public call for participants, and my apologies if we did not reach you through the social media channels we used about two years ago for that recruitment effort. All of the people on the panel represent themselves, their non-profit organizations, or academic institutions (none of them are for-profit corporate entities).  

I’ll leave you with a link to Millie’s collection, someone who has been working hard to share her personal photos and tell the story of her parents, refugees from Siberia who settled in Melbourne, Australia following WWII. 

Thanks again for your continued support of Historypin. I welcome your input and involvement, and we always welcome your donations as well to keep the platform free for anyone to use.

Wishing you all the very best in 2021,

Jon

Jon Voss
---------------------------------------------
Historypin

(504) 383-4652
Skype: jonevoss
Twitter: @jonvoss
historypin.org 

Historypin is now a part of Shift Collective!

ᐧ

[Jon Voss]

Thanks for sharing this information Vahur,

I hadn’t heard of Pastvu.com and it’s been awhile since I took a look at your project. Congrats on your continued success and growth! I love the rephotography app idea. 

I’ll send over those docs directly. Im not sure how useful they’ll be outside of the specific Historypin context though.

Jon

On Jan 12, 2021, at 4:47 AM, Vahur Puik <va...@ajapaik.ee> wrote:

Hi everybody!

The Historypin redesign public white paper was a very interesting read. 

I am also interested in the appendices mentioned but not included in the white paper – User Interviews/Personas report and Historypin Sitemap & User Flow – could these also be shared here on this group or if not I'd like to receive these in a private email.

Historypin analogue Pastvu.com that probably is the biggest (by usage numbers – 583k monthly according to SimilarWeb) platform with mostly Russian audience went open source a year ago. It's interesting you don't mention this site in your report...

Ajapaik.ee – the platform I'm the manager of – has been open source since the beginning. In 2020 we had 149,918 users, 238,556 sessions, 1,478,093 pageviews, with an avg. session duration or 00:03:33, 75 % of the users are from Estonia, 12 % from Finland.

Almost everything in the Historypin User Feedback Report is also valid/applicable to our platform. In addition to web app we also have an android application dedicated to rephotography (Ajapaik users have made almost 20k rephotos).

With best

Vahur Puik

On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 8:48 PM Jon Voss <jon....@historypin.org> wrote:

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/historypin/17E77461-0E86-4828-BD16-BC04E1E06D25%40historypin.org.

ᐧ

[masterblaster]

A truly excellent resource Vahur, congratulations on the design and content. It is great to see that you have ensured the site is responsive to different devices being used.  I have just spent an hour visiting different locations and it has been very enjoyable; your site is bookmarked and I have registered!

Aprroximately how many images do you have on site?

Regards,

Mike