Launched in autumn 2011 by a British nonprofit, HistoryPin pins historical items on a map. Their service demonstrates the potential for a global, crowdsourced database of historical media.

HistoryPin now boasts 277,348 items. Their aim is to encourage a broad audience to take part in local and global history, help people feel closer to the places they live, to conserve and open up global archives, and to become a large global archive of human history. So far, they’re off to a good start. Many cities have several dozen pins, and a few large cities have hundreds.

The challenge of global coverage

In the United Kingdom, HistoryPin’s home country, they have ~50k pins now. Some of those pins are cross-referenced with Google’s street view. For example, here are Elvis impersonators in Westminster, London, in 2006, superimposed on a current street view scene:

Despite the apparently high numbers, HistoryPin’s growth appears to be flatlining. They drew ~20k users in the few few months of 2011, helped by glowing press coverage at launch, but only at 30k more users in the last two years. They have 1,353 institutions registered, but few institutions are doing large-scale uploads. It’s unclear why growth is poor. The site is easy to use, and the usage terms are reasonable. They have a web site, as well as Android and iOS apps. One possible problem is that it’s unclear what the long-term future of HistoryPin is, so it’s not necessarily worth investing a lot of time. Also, they have a closed system, with no way to export content back out.

Growth needs to be exponential if HistoryPin has any hope of carpeting the globe. Relative to the U.K.’s 94k square miles of landmass, HistoryPin has barely 1 item for every two square miles. In London’s 607 square miles, HistoryPin has ~390 pins, again, barely 1 pin for every two square miles. HistoryPin would need at least 100x more pins to have serious global coverage. (For a sense of the scale needed for a global view, as of last year, Google Street View had photographed over 5 million miles of unique streets, covering 39 countries and about 3,000 cities, and they are rapidly expanding that.)

Nevertheless, the concept is compelling. Here’s an image from HistoryPin of a train station in Tuscon, Arizona, USA:

And here’s an image of the same building, 9 decades later, from Google Street View. It is now a restaurant:

Going global — from space

A global view is available from satellites. Here is a comparison of Tucson in summery 1984 (left) vs 2011 (right) from NASA’s State of Flux gallery, which posts weekly comparison images from satellites and land-based cameras.

Tucson, in the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona, is one of the oldest continually inhabited areas of North America, with evidence of settlements 3,000 years ago. As with many western cities, Tucson was organized on a grid pattern, which can be seen from space. The side-by-side photos show that the city has grown quickly over the past 30 years. Indeed, population in the greater Tucson area has increased from about 600,000 in 1980 to more than one million in 2011. Expansion has been largely in the eastern region since mountains on the north, west and south restrict development.

The State of Flux site is run by Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and California Institute of Technology. It is a convenient launching pad for educators and the general public interested in change. The time periods range from  centuries to days. Some are related to climate change, urbanization, or the ravage of natural hazards such as fires and floods.

Here’s the new home page:

The link “For students” doesn’t  go to a page with information for young minds who dream of space and exploration — rather, it links to a promo of a high-level NASA bureaucrat Leland Melvin receiving an award. Meanwhile, they eliminated the kinds of dreamy topics (space station, solar system, beyond earth) which were directly linked from the old home page.

Leland looks interesting, and it’s good that NASA is featuring smart black professionals on their site, but this particular story about Leland is hardly going to excite a 13 year old kid on summer break who happens to surf the NASA site.

Another important failure is the false differentiation of types of content based on specifications of the department which produces them. At the same time that leading web sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as major news outlets, are blurring the lines between text, photos, short and long videos, and audio content, NASA is taking a step backward under the delusion that the public thinks “images,” “multimedia,” and “sciencecasts” are different things, or cares:

Meanwhile, lead screen real estate is given to “events”, which links to a calendar filled with empty months, and uninformative events metadata. These are not even real events, like Google+ hangouts with top scientists and former astronauts: They are merely anniversaries, such as the anniversary of the Mars Rover launch of 2003.

All in all, the new NASA site is a hugely missed opportunity to inspire and inform the public, as well as serve the multitude of stakeholders. It was obviously designed from a hugely introverted view of internal departments and procedures. It also may reflect the poor use of surveys to plan a site redesign. For example, survey respondents might say they want “images” and “multimedia” on the new site, but that does not mean the site should be designed using those particular navigational labels.

They make a nice attempt, but incomplete, to substantially integrate with various social media channels. The problem is that social media should be more pervasively integrated, and not put in silos which are linked away. Blogs are arbitrarily differentiated from news releases. Audio podcasts are arbitrarily differentiated from other multimedia. And mobile is still an afterthought in the underfunded, underdeveloped, NASA slideshow apps.

Some other federal goverment web sites are doing better. The White House, recently redesigned Weather (NOAA), and Census Bureau are among the best. Maybe NASA can do better too.

LEGO models of every shape and size were spread on tables. The models were created by kids and geeky adults, on topics from fantasy, to trains, to animals, to space. Front and center, near the entrance, the NASA Aeronautics directorate set up a display with a large banner, some astronaut paraphernalia (e.g., gloves), and an assembly of LEGO models created by enthusiasts.

A steady stream of kids poured by the NASA booth. The LEGO event had 941 participants showing their models, and 16,500+ paying attendees.

Origins of the partnership

According to fair organizer Todd Webb, in 2009, NASA suggested some involvement in the show, but “NASA involvement was small and most wondered ‘what is that guy doing sitting there?'” Webb realized that to make it work, they had to kick it up a notch.

From NASA’s point of view, summer 2011 was good timing. The Space Shuttle Atlantis recently landed, and the Juno mission would launch during the LEGO event. NASA looks for opportunities to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It’s a priority for both President Obama and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. According to Tony Springer, the head of communications and education for NASA’s Aeronautics directorate, it was also logistically easy: NASA Headquarters was a short drive away, so “it made sense for us to participate.” Springer’s department is interested in reaching both adult attendees, and youth.

Webb says, “I suggested NASA would make a cool ‘theme’ one year, then we’d have a special logo, t-shirts, a trophy, etc.” At the time, 2010’s theme was planned, so they agreed to do it in 2011. Webb has themes for the LEGO fair each year. Past themes have been “food and drink,” and “music.” He says, “Normally I wouldn’t be quick to accept a ‘corporate’ type of entity as our theme.  That’s not very fun.  But NASA isn’t too corporate.  And it’s generic enough — spacey — that we could encourage people to participate, build models for the theme.”

The NASA booth was much more professional looking in 2011, said Webb, and they had “even more cool stuff… and made a nice presentation.” NASA was responsible for their display, and brought their own table clothes, display cases, and props.

For Webb, the motivation was the “neato-factor,” and also providing appealing mood for his events. He said the NASA presence did not boost attendance. For LEGO enthusiasts, “LEGO is all the attraction needed, and is all we feed off of.”

Audiences & impact

According to Springer, NASA looks for events that are “STEM-appropriate.” Anything from an education convention to an air show. In general, it’s a nerdy crowd at a LEGO event. Springer says, “Many of those attending BrickFair events are already predisposed to STEM disciplines: “self-interested,” according to the term of art. We are trying to amplify that interest. Since they are so attentive to design and construction, devoted LEGO builders seem to have an innate STEM interest. We hope that one day they may make the decision to transition that personal fascination into a STEM-related career, which we think would be a very positive thing.”

Springer is looking for “quality and not necessarily quantity. That translates during a given event into solid interactions with attendees; substantive conversations with educators and students that we then follow up with actions like emails, phone calls, and further exchange of educational materials. Leveraging strong initial contact with subsequent, sustained relationships (online or in person) is how we define success.”

Implementation details

To make it work, NASA had to do some leg work and provide some swag. At LEGO events, the majority of participants are fiercely independent in their interests. Webb says annual theme tends to draw just a few builders. Adult LEGO fans “don’t like to be told what to build, and most just build what’s in their genes.  So I bribed them with big prizes (an autographed book donated by NASA and a large LEGO set).  The turnout of NASA MOCs was pretty good I think.”

In terms of promotion, there were a few ground rules. Administratively, NASA created a Space Act Agreement with the Festival. Due to NASA’s strict regulations on external use of its logo or those of any its research partners (e.g., Boeing), Webb’s event was required do something special for its NASA-themed Event Kit. While the kit itself could not include the NASA logo on its label, instructions or any photographs, Webb was able to include a special tile with the NASA logo and a plain white 2×2 LEGO tile as choices for “the very last piece to be assembled.” The instructions stated: “So now you have 2 tiles left.  We leave it to you to decide which to add to your model.”

Reaching other audiences? 

The LEGO event was a great fit, but can they push the envelope? Springer says NASA Aeronautics has no current plans for more daring events, like Comic-Con. That’s a shame, since there’s a huge overlap between science and science-fiction geeks (see post by  Whitney Clavin of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab  from the 2010 Comic-Con.)

Meanwhile, the folks at Goddard are exploring collaborations that cross over into the arts. NASA and Tor/Forge recently announced a new publishing collaboration to meld the sensibilities of strong science fiction with equally strong space science. It will team up Tor/Forge authors with scientists from the Goddard Space Flight Center. Tom Doherty, publisher of Tor Books, said in a statement, “When I was a boy, books by Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and their colleagues excited me, inspiring a lifelong fascination with space and the science and technology that would get us there.”

Do it yourself

To do community outreach in the sciences or humanities, take a fresh look at local/regional events. Who can you partner with?