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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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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Jeremy finishes up his great how-to series on design process in the digital humanities. Congratulations to Mark Tebeau and his colleagues at Cleveland State’s Center for Public History and Digital Humanities on their very well designed new website. I especially like the “collaborate” tab in the main navigation. Pastigo geolocates information about historical sites and [...]

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Wikihistory is a short science fiction story about a group of future time travelers’ journeys to the mid-20th century. Structured as a series of posts to a message board or wiki, Wikihistory is good mix of alternative history and science fiction, which in several ways again makes the point that science fiction is often just [...]

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How to make a Leyden jar out of a two-liter Coke bottle, from MAKE Magazine. Top Ten Moments in Sitcom History. I think you’d have to put Lucy and Ethel’s stint at the conveyor belt at the top of the table, but a good list nevertheless. (Thanks, Jerm.) Prolific “junior ranger” Chance Finegan on the [...]

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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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It has been a while since I posted in the Tops of All Time category. That isn’t because it’s any less popular. Here are a few (“bad”) examples: The 25 Most Ridiculous Band Names in Rock History The 10 Most Ludicrous Moments in The History of 24

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It has been a while since I posted something in the Tops of All Time series, but I noticed two recent articles in PC World that fit the bill. The first is a wistful look back at the 10 Worst PCs of All Time. The second lists the 50 Best Tech Products of All Time, [...]

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Jottings.com has posted a list of the 100 oldest still-registered .com domains. First on the list: Symbolics.com, which first launched in March 1985. Other early birds include tech giants ATT.com, HP.com, IBM.com and Sun.com and big defense contractors SRI.com, Northrop.com, and Lockheed.com.

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Tekkie, a.k.a. Mark Miller, “loves computers and software.” Apparently the software developer also loves the history of technology. In Great Moments in Modern Computer History, Tekkie gives us his take on the best demos, announcements, and breakthroughs in the history of computing. At more than 4000 words long, it must truly be a labor of [...]

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