01 Jun 2009

Local objects telling global stories - a Museums Australia conference 2009 presentation

'Local objects telling global stories' is a Google Earth presentation former-CAN national project manager Joy Suliman delivered at the 2009 Museums Australia conference. It can be accessed on the collectionsaustralia Slideshare channel. (See link at bottom of this page.)

Joy geo-tagged in Google Earth a photo of the Alessi Michael Graves Blue Kettle with Bird Whistle taken on her stove top in her apartment. From there we travel to the Powerhouse Museum’s Inspired! exhibition, then onto Portland in the United States where architect Michael Graves designed what claims to be the “first postmodern building” and finally to the Italian city where Alessi runs his design studio. Now when Joy watches her birdy sing on the stove she thinks about this treasured object from a global perspective.

Joy used Google Earth rather than Google Maps because it is an application offering animation and a sense of drama. She did not embedded this kettle project into a website but has saved it as a KMZ file (which is a zipped keyhole market language file), so she can email it as an attachment to other Google Earth users. If Joy decides to embed it into a website so that other people can geotag their own Alessi kettles, we would be able to see where the little birdy sings around the world.

Geotagging objects in your collection another way of telling stories about your collection. An example of where geomapping works well is in the Flickr Commons. Institutions and the public are geotagging historic photographs so when you zoom into a place in Google maps you can see 150 years of images comparing then and now.

Joy Suliman's Little Birdy Kettle

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