I have just been reading a news report about the closure of a school in Dundee tonight, because six adults connected to the place have tested positive for Covid-19. Hopefully if this is a cluster forming it will be dealt with quickly and that all involved recover, but my interest in this story is the fact that if this is the start of another cluster, my son is due to return to university in Dundee in six weeks time, so an understandable concern.
Of course, the genie bug is never far away, and out of interest, I looked up a Google map of Dundee, to try to work out where the school is in relationship to my son's student digs.
In so doing, I noticed that many institutions are listed as 'Temporarily closed' (click on image to see in more detail):
For the last couple of days I have been working with historic OS maps from Northern Ireland to try to locate a particular property connected to my family history. I have had to use a few maps throughout the 19th century, and in looking at the Google map, the question suddenly hit me - does Google have a map archive? In a hundred years time, won't people find it useful to know from such a map what was open, and what was not, because of Covid-19, or any other number of historical queries utilising Google map based data? But also, in addition to maps, what about Google StreetView - is that archived, as places change across time?
Where else to start to find the answers but Google's own search engine! I soon found an article from The Atlantic in 2014 which noted that it has been possible to see historic images of an area as previously recorded by Google through its StreetView tool - see
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/google-maps-now-lets-you-time-travel-through-its-street-view-archives/361118/.
The facility to view historic StreetView images is acessible by clicking a small clock icon in the top left of the screen - see this example from Dundee, which shows that there are several versions of the same view dating back to 2008:
But what about maps? According to Google it is possible to see earlier images of an aerial view of an area through its free to download Google Earth Pro (
https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/earth/versions/#earth-pro). I downloaded it to test the feature, and was astonished to see a timeline showing the present day back to 1945 - although Google's images are clearly much more recent! Compare these two, the present day view above Greyfriars Burial Ground in Perth, and an image from 2006 (click to enlarge):
Handy as this will also undoubtedly turn out to be, this still does not show the mapping information, just the satellite imagery.
So my question remains - does Google actually archive the data on its Google Maps facility - in a hundred years, will I be able to note which buildings were closed because of Covid-19 from a historic Google map, or any other number of possible historical queries utilising similar data?!
If anyone knows the answer, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments section - thanks!
(All images courtesy of, and copyright to, Google)
Chris
My next 5 week
Scottish Research Online course starts August 31st - see
https://www.pharostutors.com/details.php?coursenumber=102. My book
Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, at
http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scottish2 is now out, also available are
Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed) at
http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Irish1 and
Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records at
http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scotland1. Further news published daily on
The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter
@genesblog.
