Visualizing History: Mapping the 1915 San Francisco World's Fair

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Last week, the Bancroft Library, in partnership with Historypin, held a “pinathon” at UC Berkeley’s lovely 1920’s-era Morrison Library, to help improve the information associated with the Bancroft’s recently uploaded Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) albums to Historypin’s online project. The event, at which PPIE historian Laura Ackley lent her expertise, also gave participants the opportunity to add new information to a portion of the Bancroft’s Jesse Brown Cook collection, in preparation for their upload to Historypin.

Participants gather in UC Berkeley's Morrison Library before the start of the event.
Participants gather in UC Berkeley’s Morrison Library before the start of the event.

The Bancroft Library, the official repository of PPIE records, worked with Historypin leading up to the event to map hundreds of images from its collections depicting all aspects of the 1915 world’s fair in San Francisco. Event participants, many UC Berkeley students and faculty, worked together on laptops and used resources such as printed grounds maps provided by the Bancroft as well as online exhibit directories digitized from Bancroft’s collections. Some groups explored the uploaded images on Historypin and helped to edit associated location and description information on the live site, while others worked with the raw metadata from the Jesse Brown Cook collection to attribute locations (in the form of coordinates) and dates to the collection’s images. Images uploaded to Historypin (as well as video and audio), must contain locations and dates in order to appear publicly on the website’s map.

The event kicked off with a tour of the Bancroft Library’s PPIE exhibit by Curator Theresa Salazar, followed by a reception and talk by Laura Ackley, author of San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, and Jon Voss on Historypin’s own strategies for mapping thousands of PPIE photos for this centennial celebration year. The Bancroft also displayed a handful of original PPIE artifacts from its collections in Morrison for participants to browse, completing a fun night of time-travel back to 1915.

Participants work refining information associated with Bancroft's PPIE images on Historypin's live site.
Participants work refining information associated with Bancroft’s PPIE images on Historypin’s live site.
Author Laura Ackley telling the story of San Francisco's now famed Palace of Fine Arts, a building which originated at the PPIE, with Mary Elings of the Bancroft Library helping display a street view overlay of a Bancroft Palace of Fine Arts photo on Historypin.
Author Laura Ackley telling the story of San Francisco’s now famed Palace of Fine Arts, a building which originated at the PPIE, with Mary Elings of the Bancroft Library helping display a street view overlay of a Bancroft Palace of Fine Arts photo on Historypin.

You can explore the mapped Bancroft images participants were working on here.

View the original event invite.