Google Stonehenge, Google Pompeii, Google Iraq (and France too!)

Google Streetview

Well, Google have been busy recently. I noticed Martin, from Liverpool Landscapes, had found  Google has added Stonehenge to it’s Streetview, here at least there probably won’t be any complaints form locals about privacy, although there’s a policeman somewhere near the entrance to the tunnel who you can’t quite see. There is similiar way of experiencing Stonehenge if you use Microsoft’s Photosynth which I prefer; you can move around more freely and even go along and take your own photos and upload them.

View Larger Map

Both of these types of visualising landscapes are surely a step in the right direction but both of them create a rather disjointed experience. I have been to Stonehenge and thus use these websites more to jog my memory and enhance it’s visual aspect over the purely mental or emotional but I’m not sure how cohesive a sensation it would be for someone not to have previously visited the stones. Luckily Google have added the ruins of Pompeii to Streetview as well. And yes, it is a little disorientating (I haven’t been to Pompeii), especially with the blurriness as the image pans along. The mini map in the corner helps, although I found it hard to actually find the ruins in the first place (try searching for “pompeii, italy ruins”). However, my feeble criticisms aside, these are great tools.

Google in Iraq

Google have also been busy in Iraq, they will soon begin digitising artefacts and documents from Iraq’s National Museum. 14,000 digital images will be available next year for free to view, however it isn’t made clear what further uses the images could be used for. It’d be great if rather than just taking traditional photos they could use some Photosynth-like method so you could ‘move’ round the artefact and see it from all directions. We’ll see.

France in Iraq

I also read an article last week about France’s involvement in Iraq. I have only found other references to this in online Chinese newspapers which seems odd. The news is that French and Iraqi ministers have signed two cooperation agreements on defense, culture and science which is good, but the last paragraph mentions archaeology directly,

“According to French analysts, France needs an aiding center in Iraq to help French entrepreneurs who are interested in making investment in Iraq, as well as provide supports to French research in agriculture and archaeology in the country.”

I don’t often see archaeology gaining such a profile but maybe Sarkozy is getting the bug, I hear he recently visited the excavation of an Australian and British First World War group burial site at Pheasant Wood,  Fromelles, northern France, although I’m sure this was a matter of politics rather than pure interest.

Update: I have been informed by who I presume to be the Fromelles Project Manager that President Sarkozy hasn’t visited Pheasent Wood. I’ll have a word with my supposed sources!

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La Vie Moderne

As I sit here listening to Alan Stivell I think about last night and how I went to see the french film La Vie Moderne by Raymond Depardon. It is the third and final part in his Profils Paysans trilogy about the lives of a handful of upland sheep and cow farmers in the Ardèche region of France.  Well, it wasn’t really about their lives as a particular year in their lives which are undergoing quite a transition. The old way of life is dwindling with few young people taking up the work of the countryside.

There is little detail as to how the people actually got on with their lives, lived in their taskscape if you will, but it does show that all of them are inextricably tied to the local landscape. The old Privat brothers have an 80 year history which their nephew is following, with an outsider for a wife, but she too is tied by her sense of duty to her husband. The Jean Roys’ are in a similiar situation but their son doesn’t want to work the farm but stays for his family and a sense of honour.  There is a young family who have taken a farm over from Madame Bres, then another young  family who desperately want to start farming but can’t afford to renovate their barn or buy more goats.

Obviously these people would survive if they left the mountains but their relationship stands in counterpoint toRaymond Depardon’s. The first scene is of the director driving towards the Privat farm and the last the reverse a year later, yet their is no sense of loss on the director’s part. Regret yes, but he will go off and make another film somewhere else probably with other equally ‘local’ people and be happy doing it with no ontological anxiety.

The film is not an ethnography but does give a sense of the change happening in upland rural France which is probably shadowed in other areas too, north Wales for example. I would recommend it but be weary of the rather unsettling music at the opening and end which makes it a classic piece of French cinema!

La Vie Moderne at IMDb

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