Found History

In an article posted yesterday under the title 5 Ways Social Media Will Change Recorded History, Mashable co-editor Ben Parr writes, For the first time in human history, the day-to-day interactions between people are being permanently recorded and formatted in easily organizable segments of information. I don’t disagree that social media is poised to change [...]

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Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum & Library explores our ongoing fascination with Abraham Lincoln with 21st Century Abe. Launching officially on Lincoln’s bicentennial on February 12, 2009, the site will present reflections on Lincoln’s legacy by leading scholars and artists. More interesting is that between now and February, the project’s curators will also be using Twitter, Facebook, [...]

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NEH announces funding for Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. A Visit to Yesterland – The Discontinued Disneyland. “Did you ever wonder what happened to Disneyland’s Mine Train, Flying Saucers, or Indian Village? These and other attractions, restaurants, and shops are now collected in Yesterland, a theme park on the Web.” The Museum [...]

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I originally posted this at thanksroy.org, the digital memory bank we set up in Roy’s honor. I’m cross posting it here because I think it speaks to what makes a good public historian and what made Roy the very best. *    *    * Of all the amazing qualities Roy possessed — intelligence, generosity, creativity, industry, wit, and [...]

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Here’s another one from the “Crunch” network of blogs. Today TechCrunch has a post on Apple’s 30th anniversary. While the post itself is not very interesting, many of the reader recollections solicited by the author and shared in the post’s comments section are. Currently there are nearly eighty. As our experience with Echo, the September [...]

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I can’t tell you how tired I am of reading about baby boomers and their impending retirements. The self-indulgence of aging newspaper, magazine, and television news editors in running story after story about just how interesting and important their generation has been is very nearly unbearable. Newsweek is case in point. Its 50-something editors’ self-congratulatory [...]

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Another quick one for the weekend: Game Set Watch—an “alt.video game weblog”—gives us the Top 10 Silliest Computer Mag Covers in History. Note that this isn’t a casual effort. It is the product of a long term commitment to collecting and cultural history. “Game Mag Weaseling” columnist Kevin Gifford combed though his personal collection of [...]

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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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This is huge, or potentially so. Yahoo! has launched what they are calling an “electronic anthropology project”—a digital time capsule of images, stories, video, audio, and artwork, all submitted by Yahoo! users. As of this posting, the project has collected more than 4000 objects from nearly 3000 people in just over a day. When the [...]

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The English History Matters (not to be confused with the U.S. History Matters—CHNM’s own “U.S. Survey Course on the Web”) is encouraging all England and Wales to submit entries to a “mass blog” on October 17 as part of their One Day in History drive. Organizers say they picked October 17—an “ordinary day”—because they are [...]

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