Found History

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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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