Found History

Does a pound of history amount to a hill of beans? Starbucks seems to think so. It’s pushing the history angle pretty hard in its 40th anniversary marketing campaign.

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For all the emphasis on the tool itself, the primary aim of One Week | One Tool is not tool building, it’s education. One Week | One Tool is funded by NEH under the the Institutes for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities (IATDH) program. IATDH grants “support national or regional (multistate) training programs for scholars [...]

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Scholars may not like it, but that doesn’t change the fact that in the 21st century’s fragmented media environment, marketing and branding are key to disseminating the knowledge and tools we produce. This is especially true in the field of digital humanities, where we are competing for attention not only with other humanists and other [...]

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The D&D crowd at MIT pays tribute to the late Gary Gygax with a large 20-sided die in Killian Court. Cartridge Save, a British ink and toner retailer posts a surprisingly in-depth history of print on its corporate blog. Yet again we find that history is good for sales.

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New Stella Artois website uses brewer’s long history, period costumes to sell beer. See especially “L’Origine.” Science Fiction Timeline of Inventions. Learn when the taser, credit cards were first proposed as science fiction. The History of LOLCats from G4.

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I was refilling our salt shakers last night when I noticed this little tidbit on the side of the can. It turns out my can is part of a series. In addition to the 1956 Umbrella Girl, Morton’s is printing throwbacks from 1914, 1921, 1933, and 1941. Collect them all at your local supermarket … [...]

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Last night Jeremy mentioned an article from Slate about GM’s use of images of Rosa Parks and other historic persons and events to sell Chevy trucks. Here’s another article from the New York Times. Commentary on the ad—which also features images of Joe Louis, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, the World [...]

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Together with colleagues at CHNM, I have been working for several years now on ways to elaborate and extend the practice of online collecting, especially in the areas of history of science, technology, and industry. Some of the results of that work can be found at CHNM’s Echo: Exploring and Collecting History Online website, where [...]

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The past month has seen the reintroduction of at least two classic toy lines of the 1980s. Having finally reached adulthood, having finally attained a certain level of financial and corporate clout, my generation has chosen to mark the achievement with Transformers and Choose Your Own Adventure books. Put in charge of product lines and [...]

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Stepping off a plane at BWI this weekend, I spotted an ad for Saul Ewing, the venerable Philadelphia law firm, across from the gate. Below a headline asking “Will you have the right counsel when you need it?” the ad featured a painting of General George Custer and a quote from an imagined advisor at [...]

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