Google Earth and Google Earth Voyager

摘要

In its corporate mission statement, Google promises to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."1 But what does it mean for information about architecture and history to be useful? There can be little doubt that students of both architecture and history find significant use value in simply having access to a comprehensive database of satellite and aerial photography of most of the earth's built environment, and in having available a corpus of precisely geolocated photographs and photographically rendered digital models of buildings and sites. Furthermore, the utility of introducing historical imagery such as maps and photographs into the same database, enabling the visual comparison of contemporary and past images and the assessment of changes over time, is obvious. All of this is precisely what the original Google Earth platform aimed to provide. A review in this journal almost a decade ago focused on that platform as cartography, and on the ways in which its aerial photographs operated as a database of pictorial evidence.