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 [...]

[Read more →]

This one made the rounds of Twitter earlier today thanks to Jo Guldi. This month Wired Magazine tells a cautionary tale for those following the progress of Google Books. Entitled “Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles,” the article reminds readers of Google’s 2001 acquisition of a Usenet archive of more than 700 million articles [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Nat Torkington at the O’Reilly Radar blog has news this morning that George Oates, Senior Program Manager in charge of Flickr Commons and an original member of the Flickr design team, has been laid off by Flickr’s parent company Yahoo! As the person at Yahoo! responsible for bringing together the energy and cultural resources of [...]

[Read more →]

In an interview on the most recent Digital Campus, PublicDomainReprints.org founder Yakov Shafranovich notes that one of the most popular uses of his print-on-demand service for public domain Google and Open Content Alliance books is to supply out-of-print manuals to latter day blacksmiths, pigeon breeders, and others still working in ancient, but declining, trades. Last [...]

[Read more →]

On Monday Dave Lester pointed to the release of Google’s new timeline view of search results. Found History has often commented on the importance of timelines in public understanding of history and amateur historical practice, so this seems like it could be a big development in that space. Google points out that the timeline view [...]

[Read more →]

Today Google marks the 46th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s space launch with another one of its commemorative logos. Clicking on it takes you to search results for “yuri AND gagarin”.

[Read more →]

Yesterday software engineer Matthew Gray from Inside Google Book Search posted a mashup/geo-visualization demonstrating how place name frequency changed over the course of 19th century publishing history. Gray’s four maps—one each from the 1800s, 1830s, 1860s, and 1890s—clearly point to a growing publishing industry and broader shifts in center of gravity from Europe to North [...]

[Read more →]

He doesn’t call it historical archaeology, and there’s nothing to suggest he thinks of it that way, but that’s definitely what Michal Migurski’s “scar tissue” is. It’s also a very cool example of how web technology is democratizing history, helping ordinary people do some serious work.

[Read more →]

I’m sure many of you noticed the recent controversy over Google’s use of Spanish surrealist Joan Miro’s work in a logo commemorating the 113th anniversary of the artist’s birth. Intended by Google as a “tribute” to Miro’s “extraordinary contribution,” the artist’s family and their representatives at the The Artists Rights Society nevertheless cried foul and [...]

[Read more →]