Google Earth, Street View As Historical Record in Japan

A couple of months back we summed up the many ways that Google services were being used to help Japan after the March 11 earthquake. Today we learned about two more worthwhile projects in Japan, both involving Google’s mapping technologies as historical record.

Hiroshima Archive

This is an impressive implementation of Google Earth as a medium in which to present the survivors’ accounts of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima. An extension of the Nagasaki Archive (video), the Hiroshima Archive is a project that aims to document history from those who experienced it first hand:

[All] the remaining A-bomb survivors will have died out in the coming decades. This means that those people who from their own experience have the strongest desire for peace and a nuclear-free world will be lost… [The] “Hiroshima Archive” has been produced by melding a large amount of materials accumulated over 66 years with the latest Internet technologies, with a view to passing on the experiences and messages of A-bomb survivors to future generations.

You can get an idea of how it works in the video below, but if you have Google Earth installed it’s best viewed there. Speaking as someone who has only read about the bombing in a history book, seeing human faces marked across the map is striking. Clicking through on some of these, I’m amazed to find that some of the survivor interviews are well over an hour in length.

Reconstruction View

As you know, Japan is currently in the middle of rebuilding after on of the worst disasters to strike the country since 1945 bombing. New York Times reporter Hiroko Tabuchi just published a great piece explaining how Google is sending out it’s Street View car to record digital images of areas affected by the earthquake and tsunami.

Google Street View has been criticized in Japan in the past, primarily due to privacy concerns, but it appears that the company’s efforts are welcomed in areas like Kesennuma.

Back in March The New York Times was quick to publish before-and-after satellite imagery (from GeoEye/EyeQ) of disaster-stricken areas. It’s good to know that Google’s Street View imagery will be available for news organizations and other interested parties to build upon in a similar manner as well.

Ingredients vs Meals

I forget exactly who said it, but I recently heard someone explain Google services as being internet ‘ingredients’ as opposed to pre-cooked ‘meals.’ While I do have some complaints about some of Google’s services, I love that they’re free (for the most part), and they make collaboration easy. But the ingredients vs meals analogy very nicely illustrates what the company has done right with its services in recent years.