Found History

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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The American Association of State and Local History (AASLH) provides cultural heritage professionals with some relevant information on surviving the economic downturn. JISC provides advice on choosing (or not choosing) a Creative Commons license. Missed it at the launch? Didn’t see the point? Don’t know where to start? Ars Technica has a nice reintroduction and [...]

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Ahoy, Mateys! Mills Kelly’s fall semester course “Lying about the Past” was revealed today in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Read how Mills and his students perpetrated an internet hoax about “the last American pirate” and what they learned in the process. The Chronicle is, unfortunately, gated, but you can read more on Mills’ fantastic [...]

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Jeremy Boggs at Clioweb continues his must-read series on design process for digital humanities with some notes (and code) for Front End Development. Again on front ends and again via Clioweb, the Indianapolis Museum of Art has unveiled a new “dashboard” user interface, a numerical, widgetized overview of how IMA’s online collections, programs, and social [...]

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This is kind of creepy—it reminds me of Michael Jackson’s 1991 Black or White video, which is creepy on many levels—but it’s also kind of cool. Eggman913‘s 500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art provides a compelling and potentially telling history of the evolution of Western female portraiture in the space of three minutes. [...]

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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 [...]

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The tech blogs are buzzing about Geni, a new genealogy application launched by former Paypal executive David Sacks (see Valleywag and TechCrunch for example). Billing itself as “a unique approach to solving the problem of genealogy,” Geni “lets you create a family tree through [its] fun simple interface”: When you add a relative’s email address, [...]

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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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If you ever have eight or ten hours to kill, check out CoverPop.com, a new mashup site and a goldmine of found history. According to the site’s operators, Each coverpop is an interactive mosaic, made of tiny images, such as magazine covers. These are called “micro thumbnails”. As you drag the mouse over each micro [...]

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If you haven’t done so already, visit Yahoo’s TagLines now. A rolling timeline of the eight most popular Flickr tags for each day since 2004, TagLines is the most exciting piece of historical work—amateur or otherwise—I’ve seen a while. It is a provocative preview of what will be possible when historians manage fully to wrap [...]

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