Found History

I have just started listening to an new podcast from the BBC, A History of the World in 100 Objects, written and narrated by Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum. Aside from the obvious reductionism and the occasionally irritating interstitials (lots of ambient chanting and pan flute music), the show is excellent, taking one [...]

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Mia Ridge, Lead Web Developer at the Science Museum, London (where I’m a research fellow, incidentally) points to Museums and the machine-processable web, a new wiki “for sharing, discussing, arguing over and hopefully coming to some common agreements on APIs and data schemas for museum collections.” Following closely on that, Tim Berners-Lee calls for “Raw [...]

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(my) History of Technology by Verie Sandborg. A retiree’s recollections of a lifetime with personal technology. Roots Television. User-generated genealogy videos. Interesting, but too many ads. Technica. An archive of lego history, including early advertisements, a numbered set listing, and an extensive timeline.

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Ye Olde Hipster. Merlin Mann claims Thomas Jefferson’s ivory pocket notebook as the “great-great-grandfather” of his own creation for Getting Things Done, the Hipster PDA. A History of Snowboarding in 2 Minutes Flat. (Via YouTube.) Happy New Year!

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This one comes from Jeremy. Found history, indeed. “19th Century bomb found in whale” via BBC News

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CHNM has just launched a new project called The Object of History. A partnership with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the project aims at lower cost model for “virtual” museum field trips. It also tries to open up the work of museum curators to student scrutiny. For most students, history exhibits (like [...]

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Watchismo is a collector and online dealer of vintage watches, especially digital watches, from the mid-20th century. He describes himself as “devoted to the highly unusual, obscurely rare and advanced modern designs of the 1950′s, 60′s and 70′s” and focused on the “rarest styles of the space-age.” There are some interesting galleries on the main [...]

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One more amateur history of technology site and then we move on to other things. DigiCamHistory.com provides an enormous—if poorly organized and badly designed—wealth of annotated photos and links relating to the development of digital camera technology. Like the evolt.org Browser Archive, DigiCamHistory solicits user contributions, and although it is hard to say how much [...]

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An interview with Phaidon editor Emilia Terragni about his new three-volume Phaidon Design Classics turned up Tuesday on digg. Accompanying the interview is a slideshow of twelve Designs That Never Get Old, consumer products from the last century that fit Phaidon’s definition of classic design. Among these are the table-top Kikkoman bottle and London’s familiar [...]

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