California History on Google Maps

Calisphere

The University of California have created Calisphere as a gateway to more than 150,000 digitized items. These digitized primary sources include photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts that reveal the diverse history and culture of California.

As part of the Calisphere project a number of Google Maps have been created to showcase some of the digitized historical photographs in the collection. Five maps have been produced to display the photographs by category. The categories are; transportation, city scenes, civic buildings, disasters andeveryday life.

Each of the maps displays the location of the photograph with a small thumbnail image. If you click on the thumbnail you can view the image in an information window and click through to get more information about the image.

Tagging Ghosts with Google Maps

Ghostag

When I saw the name of this Google Maps application I hoped that the creators had managed to attach GPS devices to a number of ghosts and were tracking their movements in real-time. No such luck. Ghostag is instead a crowd-sourced map of ghost sightings.

To tag a ghost on the map you simply need to click on a location and add the details of your sighting. If you manage to get a picture of the ghost (or failing that - the location of the sighting) you can also add that to the map.

The map uses the Google Maps API v3 Styled Maps function to create a suitably creepy look. When viewing the map turn on your speakers as it also contains some ghostly sounds and the occasional ghost like apparition appearing on top of the map.

Woooooo!