Website | A Street Near You
Danny Birchall is moved by a website that uses data from several sources to reveal the lives of first world war soldiers
A Street Near You is a very simple and effective website: it allows you to search for the home addresses of allied service men and women who died during the first world war and find out more about their lives and deaths.
Using war-records data combined from several sources, including the Imperial War Museum and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, it makes the global painfully local. You can search your own neighbourhood and find on its streets the Arthurs and Alfreds who grew up there, went off to war, and never came home.
A Street Near You is even more remarkable, however, in that it’s all the work of a single person. James Morley, a freelance cultural heritage data specialist and Ealing local history buff, was intrigued by the possibility of translating textual location information in various first world war data sets into map references. Starting with Ealing, in under a year he’d processed locations for more than half a million service men and women.
In the days leading up to 2018’s Remembrance Sunday, the site went viral, referenced across social media and attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors. This created its own problems, as the price of hosting the site spiralled. The cultural tech community came to Morley’s aid, crowdfunding costs and tweaking performance.
Bringing together different institutions’ data sets to create engaging experiences for the public is one of the things that good open data and good open source tools make possible. It’s also often the stuff of tedious inter-museum committees and laborious funding bids. A Street Near You shows that sometimes you can just get off your backside and make something wonderful.
Website | Red Lines
Evan Roth’s Red Lines is an online artwork about the undersea cables that make our globally networked lives possible. Opening the work launches one of a series of slow-motion infrared videos of a coastal location where a fibre-optic cable enters the sea.
Activating the video also activates an internet connection to that location, via a peer network, and once activated, you can turn your home or office into a gallery displaying the work – a meditative moving landscape.
Red Lines is an Artangel commission: an organisation famous for outstanding physical artworks that “ambush” you in a particular location: Rachel Whiteread’s concrete House (1993-4), and Roger Hiorns’ crystal-coated ex-council flat, Seizure (2008). Red Lines is an attempt to embrace the whole world in a more diffuse fashion, to visibly connect us by showing how we are invisibly linked. Website | War in the Pacific
Not all war history is in war museums: it resides in many other places, including below the waves. The Ocean Agency’s new project War in the Pacific uses Google Earth’s 360-degree panorama technology to tour the final resting place of boats, planes and even jeeps from the US’s Pacific battles in world war two.
From Pearl Harbour to Vanuatu and Saipan, a curated tour gives you Google’s familiar pinch, zoom, pan and twirl tools to explore the sombre underwater graves of warriors and war machines.
Browsing the War in the Pacific site isn’t a lengthy experience. But something about its brief captions and the surprise of dipping below the waves takes it beyond the mundane virtual pictures on virtual walls approach of Google Arts and Culture.
The Ocean Agency is an international NGO that has used underwater cameras to promote the cause of ocean conservation for some years. With its dip into military history, perhaps it is also offering museums some ideas for presenting and contextualising the history that lies beyond their walls.