Google Street View recently added two Roman catacombs to its repertoire—the Catacomb of Priscilla and the Dino Companion. The Catacomb of Priscilla was used for Christian burials in the second through fourth centuries, and contains wall paintings of saints and other symbols.
160 objects from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation‘s collections are now available in the Google Art Project, and include paintings, furniture, silver, Chinese export porcelain, as well as ceramics, prints, maps, textiles, and numismatics.
For more information, check out the Colonial Williamsburg collection in Google Art!
Panoramio is a photo-sharing community powered by Google that allows users to tag their photos with geographic information so they can be plotted on a map and searched for by location. You can browse by location, and click on individual images from the map, or search for specific sites and locations.
Some of the images are indeed panoramas, and Panoramio includes both flat and spherical panoramas (the latter provide a 360º of a place). For example, check out this haunting spherical panorama of the Holocaust Monument in Berlin.
This website is useful for studying architecture, cities, and the built environment, and it’s also great for some arm-chair traveling. You can also add your own images to the project.
For more information or to start exploring, check out Panoramio!
Just in time for this great weather, Curbed Chicago and the Chicago Public Art Group have created a Google Map identifying great examples of public art underneath Chicago’s overpasses. The map includes several murals that are in Hyde Park, so happy exploring!
For more information about public art resources, see our post about the Public Art Archive.
Via Curbed
Millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive are available via Google Images, only a small number of which have been published. Eventually the project will include about 10 million images. You can search specifically in the LIFE search portal, or you can add “source:life” to any Google image search to return only images from the LIFE photo archive.
The archive includes documentary photography by many well-known photographers working in the magazine industry during the hey day of photojournalism, including Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt,
The very first cover of LIFE magazine was a photograph taken by Margaret Bourke-White of Fort Peck in Montana. The issue was published on November 23, 1936. Images from the LIFE photo archive are for personal, non-commercial use only.
For more information, visit the LIFE photo archive digital collection hosted by Google Images.
The Google Cultural Institute and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem collaborated to bring five complete Dead Sea Scrolls online. The new digital library (released Tuesday, December 18), allows users to study and discover the the most ancient biblical manuscripts on earth:
The website gives searchable, fast-loading, high-resolution images of the scrolls, as well as short explanatory videos and background information on the texts and their history. The scroll text is also discoverable via web search. If you search for a phrase from the scrolls, a link to that text within the scroll may surface in your search results. For example, try searching on Google for [And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb Dead Sea Scroll].
English translations of the manuscripts are also available. The Google Cultural Institute is also responsible for the Art Project as well as other digital humanities projects, including Versailles 3D and La France en relief. For the Dead Sea Scrolls project, they used imaging technology originally developed for NASA. The scrolls weren’t discovered until 1947, and they had been in the Qumran caves for two thousand years. ArtDaily reports:
The parchment and papyrus scrolls contain Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic script, and include several of the earliest-known texts from the Bible, including the oldest surviving copy of the Ten Commandments. The oldest of the documents dates to the third century BC and the most recent to about 70 AD, when Roman troops destroyed the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The artefacts are housed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where the larger pieces are shown at the dimly lit Shrine of the Book on a rotational basis in order to minimise damage from exposure. When not on show, they are kept in a dark, climate-controlled storeroom in conditions similar to those in the Qumran caves, where the humidity, temperature and darkness preserved the scrolls for two millennia.
For more information, visit the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls.
Via artdaily.org
Yesterday Google Art Project launched an impressive expansion which now includes 30,000 high-resolution images from more than 150 museums worldwide. Last year the project included just 1,000 images, mostly of Western paintings. Today’s Google Art Project includes greater cultural diversity as well as photographs, street art, and more. The project is freely available to the public online.
Using a combination of various Google technologies and expert information provided by our museum partners, we have created a unique online art experience. Users can explore a wide range of artworks at brushstroke level detail, take a virtual tour of a museum and even build their own collections to share.
Additional images from the Art Institute of Chicago are now available in Google’s online galleries. The upgrade was announced at the Art Institute yesterday, with Google president Margo Georgiadis welcomed by mayor Rahm Emanuel. Read more about the project here.
Google Goggles is a mobile app that uses images to search the Internet. Not long ago Google introduced their reverse-image search to the web; the concept of Google Goggles is similar, but takes functionality even further. For example: not sure who designed that famous building you’re seeing as a tourist in Rome? Having trouble translating that Italian dinner menu? Want more information about a book, logo, bottle of wine, or painting? There’s now an app for that!
Additionally, in collaboration with Google, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has made 76,000 two-dimensional works of art from their collection accessible through Google Goggles. If you want to know more about a work of art exhibited in the museum, you can take a picture and search for it via Google Goggles to quickly see authoritative and contextual information from the Met. This information will also display if you see a work belonging to the Met in a book, on a banner, or elsewhere in the world. Check out this video from the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an illustrated introduction to the partnership.
The app is free and available on both iPhone (iOS 4.0) and Android (2.1+) platforms. If you’ve already downloaded iOS 5.0 for iPhone, the app won’t work, but we hope that a fix for this is under development!
The Dead Sea Scrolls, so ancient and fragile that direct light cannot shine on them, are now available to search and read online in a project launched today by the Israel Museum and Google Inc.
Did you know? You can now drag image files from your computer into the Google Image search bar to perform an image-based search. Like Tineye, this ability to do a reverse search for images may help users connect images lacking data with information on the Internet. Google will also tell you the pixel dimensions of your image and link to alternate sizes, if available.