Google Street View and the Tate

This is both cool and tragic. Google Street View in the UK was announced a few days ago. For those who don’t know, this means Google drove around in a car with a massive amount of cameras on the roof that takes pictures every few metres. The pictures are then stitched together to form a panorama you can somewhat move around.

Someone (maybe the Tate themselves? Or whoever svmapplets.com are) wasted no time in putting a few paintings from the Tate collection into Street View to compare the landscapes. You can see just how much has changed.

I am a fan of museums and maps, and think there’s a lot more interesting stuff to be done with museum objects and GPS co-ordinates. Where an object is located, where it has been, where is it going (on tour?) where it was dug out of the ground or created would make great additions to museum documentations. Then, release it with an API and let people make there own maps from the collections. I’m sure someone is already doing this.

This part is the tragedy. As part of their privacy policy, any image can be requested to be removed or censored. (I’m not going to link to any article to prove this as they all seem to be reactionary nonsense). There are many other “sensitive” images removed and it’s already affected the Tate’s map.

Here is a link to where Turner’s Old London Bridge, with the Monument and the Church of St Magnus King and Martyr, 1794-5 was viewed from when he was painting it.

As you can see: “This image is no longer available”.