Innovative Mapping Tools Enliven Content — and Missions

• By Alexandra Sastre
• August 12, 2008

Google Maps may not immediately come to mind as a resource museums would necessarily find useful, but three very different projects reveal the power of interactive maps to bring a museum’s content (and mission) to life:

• The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative is a groundbreaking exhibit that raises awareness about threats of genocide across the globe. Recording the locations of violence and capturing related stories and information through photographs and testimonials, these maps bear witness and inform citizens, governments, and institutions about the history of genocidal violence and its current threat.
• A radically different mapping project: the Museum of London’s Map My London site, where contributors can add their text, photos and videos to London locations that have meaning to them. Contributors’ entries are sorted and searchable by subject matter (such as “Fate/Coincidence” and “Beauty/Horror.”) The result is a whimsical, sometimes touching and surprisingly informative look at this great city.

Night Kitchen also just completed a project utilizing mapping technologies that is again uniquely different from the two I mention above. The East End Stories site for the Parrish Art Museum uses Google Maps to capture the art, artwork, and history of this storied artists’ community. All of these interesting projects are worth exploring not only in their own rights but as thought-provoking examples of how a tool which might not intuitively facilitate exhibit content very much does.

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