Conan O’Brien’s Silicon Valley tour winds up at Google as part of his “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour.” In this setting, you can really see his comic/improvisational talents come alive (more so than on late night TV). Give it a watch and tell me if you don’t get a good laugh…
An Epic Journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad
Google and the Russian Railways recently joined forces to create a virtual tour of the historic Trans-Siberian railroad. It’s the longest railway in the world, moving from Moscow to Vladivostok, cutting across two continents, 12 regions and 87 cities. Now, you can take the six-day journey from the comfort of your own home. Through a special page on Google Maps, you can watch video of the trip unfold, as if you were a passenger, and also enjoy classic Russian literature, music and photos along the way. As you roll out of Moscow, start listening to a free audio version of Tolstoy’s War & Peace (in Russian, of course) and ease into the 150 hour trip. How’s that for an epic virtual journey?
via @6oz
Tour New York City in 3D with Google Earth
The latest innovation by Google Earth. Get more details at The Google Lat Long Blog.
Google Creating Grants to Study Digital Books
The details are still hazy. But we know this: Google will be launching a “collaborative research program to explore the digital humanities” using Google Books. Scholars will get up to $50,000 per year, and they’ll come from eight potential disciplines (archaeology, history, anthropology, linguistics, literature, classics, philosophy & sociology). And what’s the point of their research? Essentially to make Google’s online digital library more effective and friendly for researchers. Just last year, a prominent academic called Google Books a “Disaster for Scholars” in a high profile forum. The new grants should begin to address these concerns in some meaningful ways. For more information, head over to The Chronicle of Higher Education, which has the full story.
YouTube EDU Turns One Today
Just wanted to send out a quick birthday wish to YouTube EDU, which celebrates its first birthday today. The site now features over 65,000 academic videos and 350 full courses, many coming from universities like Stanford, Yale, and MIT. My program at Stanford has happily contributed 12 courses to the collection (find them here), and they’ve been downloaded by thousands of viewers across the world. It’s all very gratifying.
If you want to learn more about YouTube EDU, you can read this piece I posted shortly after it launched. But, better yet, you should give the site itself a visit. And, to the folks at YouTube, keep up the good work!
PS If you’re looking for more intelligent content on YouTube, you should peruse our page that highlights the smartest video channels on the Tube. NASA, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Google Talks, TED Talks — they’re all listed here.
Google Lit Trips
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.
Time Travel with Google Earth
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.
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 to Provide Virtual Tours of 19 World Heritage Sites
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”
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