BibliOdyssey captures the soul of the Americas.
Scott Carney drops in on the world’s last handwritten newspaper.
gmtPlus9(-15) visits the Museum of Japanese Anesthesia.
Moon River discovers scratch atlases for a proposed 1977 Atlas of North American Cultures.
Radical Cartography points to a map of all the ships in the ocean.
The American Newspaper Repository implores you to dance in [...]
Monthly Archives: March 2007
Collectors’ Items
March 27 07
Cloud Notes
March 25 07
Joe Lamantia is onto something with his idea for “cloud notes”—text-cloud versions of new books for use as preparation for cocktail-party conversation. He knows how to sell them:
[...] text clouds are the common executive summary on steroids and acid simultaneously; assembled with muscular syntactical and semantic processing, and fed to reading-fatigued post-literates as swirling blobs [...]
History Blogging is the New Twitter
March 22 07
We’re on a history kick at the 92nd Street Y today. It’s all because of Shorpy.
Unusual New York Public Library Collections
March 19 07
Research Room panorama. Full version.
The New York Public Library as we know it today began with the merging of three private collections, those of James Lenox, John Jacob Astor and Samuel J. Tilden (hence the library’s official name: The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations). Since then many other fabulously wealthy [...]
Sweet and Low: A Brooklyn Family History
March 14 07
The latest 92nd Street Y podcast is well worth a download, particularly if you have an inventor-grandfather.
A New Look
March 8 07
We launched a much-needed redesign at the 92nd Street Y tonight. Embedded Flash, rollovers and RSS badges rule the day, and the content’s been lured away from the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Send us feedback and tweets on your new navigational experiences.
Disemvowelled Site of the Day: Scribd
March 6 07
Once upon a time, before my time, text files were the most interesting thing on the internet. You could learn how to program computers, blow things up, pick up girls, obtain free phone calls, survive nuclear war, pirate TV signals, perform witchcraft and conquer Zork in one short evening without leaving your bedroom. You could [...]
Bookish Social Network Socialization
March 1 07
When Ning relaunched with their “Create Your Own Social Network for Anything” tagline, I joked that someone should use Ning to create a social network for social networks. LibraryThing creator Tim Spalding was ahead of the game as usual and went and did exactly that: SocialCatalogers is a social network for people who make or [...]