2011 was a big year for the UK Royal Family, with Prince William’s marriage to Kate Middleton winning the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of people around the world. In fact, the event was the number one search term on Google in the UK last year.
2012 is gearing up for another big year for the Royal Family, as this year marks the Queen’s 60th anniversary on the throne. And to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee, Google is teaming up with Historypin to launch an interactive online gallery covering Queen Elizabeth II’s tenure so far.
If you’re new to Historypin, it’s a platform that lets people “record the story of human history”. It was beta-launched in June 2010, and launched globally in July last year, partnerhing with over 100 libraries, archives and museums, which upload and pin their content to Historypin. It was developed by the not-for-profit company We Are What We Do, in partnership with Google
The Pinning The Queen’s History project will constitute photos, videos and audio clips ‘pinned’ directly onto a Google Map on the project site, each correlating to the location they were captured.
Since 1952, The Queen has made 261 official overseas visits, covering 116 different countries, and with that in mind Historypin is looking to get the public participating in the project by submitting their own media to the site.
The content will be overlaid onto Street View too, so you can compare views from throughout the Queen’s reign with how the streets look today:
“The collection has been boosted by the provision of images from The Queen’s overseas visits taken by press photographers, and by photographs of items from the Buckingham Palace’s Royal Archives,” says Ed Parsons, Geospatial Technologist at Google in a blog post today.
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