Open Culture » Google

Google Lit Trips

Wes Alwan — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:14:24 +0000

For three years, English teacher Jerome Burg has been using Google Earth to teach literature. Each “Lit Trip” involves mapping the movements of characters over a plot’s timeline and providing excerpts, pictures, and links at each location. I found a lit trip for one of my favorite novels, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which involves a lot of movement across the old West. McCarthy himself is said to have spent years tracing these paths and studying locations in preparation for writing the novel. You’ll find a complete list of lit trips here, including such classics as Macbeth, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and The Odyssey. It’s difficult to get a sense of the fantastic effect of visually unpacking a plot without downloading a lit trip and trying it within Google Earth (download here). But here’s a video of a lit trip for Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey. It will give you a quick taste of the lit trip experience:

Finally, you can find a two-part video introduction to Lit Trips by Kate Reavey, a professor at Peninsula College, here and here.

Wes Alwan lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he works as a writer and researcher and attends the Institute for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. He also participates in The Partially Examined Life, a podcast consisting of informal discussions about philosophical texts by three philosophy graduate school dropouts.

Google Lit Trips is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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Time Travel with Google Earth

Wes Alwan — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:31:49 +0000

Google Earth’s historical imagery feature now includes aerial footage of the aftermath of World War II, allowing users to comprehend the extent of post-war destruction by comparing photos of cities as they are today to those of bombed out cities immediately after the war.

Here’s Warsaw in 1935, devastated in 1943, and restored today. You can click here to see the pictures in a bigger size.

For more imagery, including pictures of Stuttgart, Naples and Lyon, see the Google Earth blog.

Time Travel with Google Earth is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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Google to Provide Virtual Tours of 19 World Heritage Sites

Dan Colman — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 07:51:01 +0000

On Friday, I mentioned that you can now visit the Roman ruins at Pompeii, Stonehenge and Versailles via Google Street View. What I didn’t realize is that this looks to be part of a larger initiative, a larger attempt to provide digital tours of important world heritage sites. According to this UNESCO announcement, 19 historical sites will be included, and I’ve listed them below. The video above offers more details.

“Spain: Santiago de Compostela (Old Town); Old Town of Cáceres; Historic Walled Town of Cuenca; Old City of Salamanca; Old Town of Ávila with its Extra-Muros Churches; Old Town of Segovia and its Aqueduct; Historic City of Toledo France: Palace and Park of Versailles; Paris, Banks of the Seine Italy: Archaeological Areas of Pompei, Herculaneum and Torre Annunziata; Historic Centre of Siena; Historic Centre of Urbino; Historic Centre of San Gimignano Netherlands: Mill Network at Kinderdijk-Elshout Czech Republic: Holy Trinity Column in Olomouc; Historic Centre of Český Krumlov; Historic Centre of Prague United Kingdom: Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew”

Google to Provide Virtual Tours of 19 World Heritage Sites is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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Visit Pompeii (also Stonehenge & Versailles) with Google Street View

Dan Colman — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:15:47 +0000

The story of Pompeii is well known. Back in 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted and covered the neighboring Roman city with 60 feet of ash over the course of two days. The city was wiped out and then entombed for centuries, until archaeologists started unearthing the ruins in the 18th and 19th centuries, offering the modern world an amazing window into the finer details of ancient Roman life. (Just for the record, digging continues there today, and I even got to do some this past summer.) Today, Google is helping deepen the modern connection to the ancient world. Using Google Street view, you can tour Pompeii in 3D from the comfort of your own home. To begin walking through the ancient city, just click here.

As a side note, this isn’t the first time Google has used Street View in such a way. You can also find tours of Stonehenge and Louis XIV’s Versailles. Plus, you can also use Google Earth, another Google program, to tour the ancient city of Rome.

Finally, to dig deeper into ancient history, I’d recommend looking through our previous post, Learning Ancient History for Free. This will point you to some of the best free courses available on the web.

via Mashable and the National Post

Visit Pompeii (also Stonehenge & Versailles) with Google Street View is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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Google Puts Supreme Court Opinions Online

Dan Colman — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:06:19 +0000

A quick fyi: Starting today, you can find online legal opinions from the Supreme Court, as well as federal and state courts, thanks to Google Scholar. When you visit Google Scholar, click on the ”Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and then begin your query. If you type ”separate but equal,” Scholar with present you with famous Supreme Court Cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education. You get the gist. You can read more about this online legal database over at Google’s blog.

UPDATE/NOTE FROM READER: “This has already been done for the US Supreme Court, and very well, at oyez.org. Oyez is easy to use, has lots of additional content, including summaries and audio of oral arguments, and is ad-free and Creative Commons licensed for its original content. Plus, you can search by court term, Justice, and the name of the legal counsel.” An alternative source to look at…

Google Puts Supreme Court Opinions Online is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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US Justice Department Looks to Restructure Google Books Settlement

Dan Colman — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 07:38:01 +0000

The US Justice Department officially weighed in today on the Google Books settlement with publishers and authors. On the plus side for Google, the government wants to see the project continue because it has clear social benefits. On the downside, the DOJ has concerns about antitrust and copyright issues, and it’s looking for the deal to get restructured. You can get more details in The Wall Street Journal. It’s late. I’m out.

Related Content:

The Google Book Downloader

Google Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars?

US Justice Department Looks to Restructure Google Books Settlement is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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The Google Book Downloader

Dan Colman — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:32:40 +0000

A quick heads up: Lifehacker is highlighting today some new software (Windows only) that will let you download free access/public domain texts from Google Book Search and then turn them into neat PDF files. To get tips on how to use the software created by a third party, not Google, head on over to Lifehacker. I haven’t personally used the Downloader, mainly because I work on a Mac. If you try it out, let us know how the software works for you.

The Google Book Downloader is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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Google Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars?

Dan Colman — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:22:38 +0000

Critics of Google Book Search (and its class-action settlement with publishers) are popping up everywhere. European governments have voiced their displeasure. The US Justice Department has placed the settlement under review. Amazon is protesting. Yahoo and Microsoft have piled on too. And now you can add academics to the list. Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Geoffrey Nunberg, a prominent UC Berkeley linguist (who also often appears on NPR), wonders what will happen to scholarship if Google Book Search becomes the world’s largest digital library (something the class action settlement would virtually guarantee). The problem comes down to this: The average person will be able to “google” the digital library (“When was the Franco-Prussian War?”) and find useful information. But scholars will run into problems when they try to ask more finely tuned questions. (“When did the word happiness start to replace the word felicity in the English language?) And that’s because Google’s metadata is a “train wreck: a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess.” For example, according to Nunberg, Google metadata says that all of the following texts were published in 1899. Raymond Chandler’s Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, André Malraux’s La Condition Humaine, Stephen King’s Christine, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society 1780-1950, and Robert Shelton’s biography of Bob Dylan. And it dates Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities back to 1888. You don’t really need to be an academic to get the gist. Google has some kinks to work out, especially if it’s going to be the only major online library in town. For more, you can read Nunberg’s longer piece here.

Google Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars? is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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Touring Mars with Google Earth

Dan Colman — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 06:43:40 +0000

Google Earth has somewhat outgrown its name. These days, Google’s satellite program (download it here) gives you more than a unique view of our planet Earth. It also offers a nice tour of Mars (and the Moon). The Mars tour is guided by a familiar voice — the voice of Ira Flatow, who hosts the well known NPR program, Talk Of The Nation: Science Friday. The video below will show you how to access the tour in a quick two minutes. In the meantime, you should also note that Google Earth hosts other educational content. In the past, we’ve mentioned how the program will let you tour the Prado Art collection in Spain, and also see Ancient Rome in 3D. But that’s not where the educational content ends. For more, please visit this summary page assembled by Google.

Launch the program, and then toggle on the Uranus icon on the top nav bar. Then

Touring Mars with Google Earth is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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Open Books from Google

Dan Colman — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:26:35 +0000

New from the Google Books Blog:

Try doing a search for [Hamlet] on Google Books. The first few results you’ll get are “Full View” books — which means you can read the full text. And, because the book is in the public domain, you can also download a copy of Hamlet in PDF form.

Starting today, you’ll be able to download these and over one million public domain books from Google Books in an additional format. We’re excited to now offer downloads in EPUB format, a free and open industry standard for electronic books. It’s supported by a wide variety of applications, so once you download a book, you’ll be able to read it on any device or through any reading application that supports the format. That means that people will be able to access public domain works that we’ve digitized from libraries around the world in more ways, including some that haven’t even been built or imagined yet.

The post continues here.

Open Books from Google is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

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