Found History

Yesterday I received a letter from Google addressed to Robert T. Gunther at Found History. As founder of the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford, where I did my doctoral work, and a major figure in my dissertation, I am very honored to welcome Dr. Gunther to the Found History staff. Despite having [...]

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Via Mashable, yet another timeline service: Timetoast. Many readers will have seen this already, but Robert Darton’s February piece in The New York Review of Books is the most readable discussion I have seen of the Google Books settlement. Fresh + New(er), the Powerhouse Museum’s always interesting blog, describes that museum’s recent open house for [...]

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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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Along with “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” “release early and often” is something of a mantra around CHNM, especially when it comes to software and web application development. For a variety of reasons, not least the invaluable testing and feedback projects get when they actually make it into the wild, CHNM has [...]

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Last month on the Digital Campus podcast, Mills, Dan, and I offered our take on the top ten stories of 2008 and our predictions for the biggest stories of 2009. As we readily acknowledge, the “top ten” device is a crude one, but it remains a perennial favorite, both among Digital Campus listeners and across [...]

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Let me join the choruses celebrating WordCamp Ed, which makes its debut in Fairfax on November 22, 2008. Organized by CHNM and the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown (but mainly by our own Dave Lester), WordCamp Ed will bring together teachers of all stripes to talk about educational uses for [...]

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Geek meme: Command line history. For about a month during the spring, geeks everywhere were using history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s \n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head to post their top ten most used shell commands to the interwebs. Samuel Pepys on Twitter. Good idea, but doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. I have enjoyed the Pepys Diary [...]

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Finally! From our talented Polish colleagues at Historia i Media comes Feeds, a much needed new resource that uses Google Reader to aggregate and filter RSS streams from digital historians around the world. “One Feed to rule them all, One Feed to find them, One Feed to bring them all and in the darkness bind [...]

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A Year Before is a WordPress plugin allowing users to display titles of articles posted n number of days ago. Its developers suggest using it in a “historical corner” to show “what happened in your blog e.g. 30 days, 6 months or a year before.” Tenspotting. Chock full of “best ever” lists. 28 Weird Al [...]

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I just finished watching the inaugural episode of THAT Podcast (“The Humanities and Technology Podcast”), the new video podcast from CHNM creative lead, Jeremy Boggs and CHNM web developer, Dave Lester. Wow. Considering Jeremy and Dave’s technical chops, I wasn’t surprised at the excellent production values. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised at the [...]

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