Digital Archeology: Findings from Hanoi’s Westlake
The first picture ever uploaded to the internet now dates to 1992. It captures a comedy band based at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory in Switzerland, where the early development of the internet found its roots. Fast forward to today, and there are billions of pictures online, many of them linked to the place they were taken.
Through the emergence of social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, WeChat, etc. — the volume of online image postings has exploded. No longer is posting an image a deliberate act of committing an individual image to the internet, but rather an almost automatic part of day to day life. Global activity on the internet is now mind-boggling in volume to the second. How many selfies are generated in any given city in any given day? Where do they all end up?
Digital Archeology for Understanding the History of Places
Archeology is study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. But as our lives are increasingly digital, what about a digital archeology of local imagery? An exploration of Tay Ho district, a rapidly changing area of Hanoi, gives a glimpse of how image relics persist on the web.
The tools of digital archeology when it comes to images that relate to a place like Tay Ho are no longer shovels and brushes. Nor the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Rather its is now the ability to associate a relevant image in the digital world to a specific place and time, and to offer a credible narrative around these digital relics. As the big data of images on the web grows older, exponentially, and faster, curation will be needed to ground this for insights into heritage of a place. The tools of digital geography are now geo-tagging, meta-data, and platforms.
Data analytics and visualizations now try to make sense of thee images, sometimes with an aesthetic angle.Take Prototrails, a project that has visualized over 2.3 million Instagram pictures across 13 cities, from New York, San Francisco, Tokyo to Bangkok in different ways.
Beachcombing the Internet for Geotagged Images
Geo-tagging means adding latitude and longitude — or Global Positioning System — coordinates to a picture. The assumed location of pictures can be added to as part of so-called meta-data. This metadata can come from a contributor associating the picture with a place on the map (say “pinning” it on Google maps), or more commonly these days, from the position read from the smartphone. This would refer to the point from which the picture was taken, rather than the focus of what it depicts.
As the stock of geo-tagged pictures on the internet has growing from thousands to billions to trillions, how to make sense of this “big data.” Could an internet traveler sifting through all these pixels tell as story as compelling as those delivered by the traditional archeologist digging in desert sands?
Google Earth presents a view of any location on the planet. Search for Tay Ho and find the image of Tay Ho, translated as Westlake. To be see are a few dozen images. Tracing one image shows that it comes from a now discontinued photo service, Picasa. “Picasa” is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa (Spanish for “my house”) and “pic” for pictures. Digging with other images even reveals the device used to capture the image, and the identity of the contributor.
Growing concerns about privacy and intellectual property has led to a less freewheeling approach to the widespread sharing of images on the internet. Different platforms are also increasingly focusing on the commercial value of images online. In 2018, both Facebook and Instagram made major changes to the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the digital pipes that other applications (including Phototrails) could use to pull in images.
A more photographer oriented site has been Flickr. Search “Tay Ho” on the site, and get close to ten thousand photos.
Travel Back in Time on the Internet
Going back further in time, the internet is also increasingly serving as a repository for historical hard copy images from books and postcards depicting locations. Unless explicitly geo-tagged, linking these visual artifacts in digital archeology now requires re-determining their location of focus and perspective. What did the image capture, and from where?
Search on “Grand Lac Hanoi” and soon you will stumble on old postcards, like this image of Chu Van An High School. Still present today at the soundside of Westlake, the school was established in 1908, and originally known as Pomelo High School. Return to Google Earth 110 years later, and you will still see the core structure there, but with radically changed surroundings.
A bit of historical knowledge and online searching shows that this are of Grand Lac was previously home of a Seaplane airport during the French Colonial period, and the Lake also subject to aerial imagery. All of this can currently be found back on sites such as Flickr.
A proverbial dip in Westlake’s digital archeology reveals a vast and potentially overwhelming set of imagery online. The extent of digital artifacts are vast, but highlight fragmented. The objective of digital archeology, just like traditional archeology is to reveal how local activity has evolved based on piecing together these fragments. The Old Tay Ho project is designed to bring these fragments together by clarifying both their locations, but above all the perspectives of both locals and foreigners who have lived and experienced these different periods of a changing Tay Ho.
To see the sequence of maps against the current map of changing Hanoi Westlake, explore oldtayho.com.
This is a blog in a series intended to bring the history and ongoing changes around Westlake to life, including but bringing together images, stories, and places. Follow oldtayho.com for further explorations. Have an idea for future blog topics, let us know!
Suggested Reading
Goodman, James Edward, (2010), A Dragon Still Ascending: 1000 Years of Hanoi, Hanoi: The gioi Publishers, 260p
Selected Background Maps (for Old Hanoi)
1873, [undated?], 1882, 1885, 1891, 1898, 1915
Source: Saigoneer, 2014, 20 Beautiful Old Maps of Hanoi, 28th, November, https://imgur.com/a/js6sR#9afdfsm
