Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, November 03, 2008

Academic uses for Google Earth

Jeffrey R. Young, Is Google Earth Becoming a Platform for Academic Scholarship?, Wired Campus, October 30, 2008.

Earlier this year scholars at the University of Richmond unveiled an innovative Web site that displays county-by-county election data from U.S. presidential elections since 1840. Now their project’s been Googled.

In an effort to get more exposure for their data just in time for election day, the university’s Digital Scholarship Lab spent the past few months working with Google engineers to embed the data into Google Maps and Google Earth. The results are now part of Google’s election Web site.

In a statement released today, Rick Klau, a manager on Google’s Elections team said, the company hoped other universities would use the Google Earth platform “to share information and make a complex collection of data structures more easily accessible.” ...