Rare Globes From the 1600s Are Being Digitized So You Can Spin Them Online | Motherboard

"Researchers at the Osher Map Library (OML) and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at the University of Southern Maine are making a series of historic globes, some over 400-years-old, accessible online in all their 3D rotatable and interactive glory. Their work is supported by a $60k (£43k) National Endowment for the Humanities Fund ... The conservation and digitization team set out to create a virtual space where users from all around the world could not only turn, swivel, and zoom onto the historic globes as they wish, but also learn about them through the manuals that were published alongside them. Some highlights in the collection, according to Fowler, are Dutch cartographer Willem Janszoon Blaeu’s celestial globes from 1603 and 1606. Celestial globes are spherical objects that display the constellations ..."