Artamonoff Collection Shows Istanbul and Western Turkey In Photographs, 1935-1945
This collection is a bit too small to be one I’d normally cover, but when Harvard announced it last week I found the pictures to be compelling, and wanted to make sure you knew about it. The new collection is called the Nicholas V. Artamonoff Collection, and it features 543 photos taken by Artamonoff between 1935 and 1945, at sites (archaelogical sites, and ruins) in Istanbul and western Turkey. The collection is available at http://icfa.doaks.org/collections/artamonoff/items.
The photographs can be browsed in toto, via a map, via a tag cloud, or with a keyword search. I looked at the tag cloud and chose brickwork, for which I got 61 results.
The pictures are presented in a grid with location, thumbnail, and brief description. The individual item pages show larger pictures (but I wish they could be larger, I feel like I missed a lot of detail), date taken, more extensive description, and in many places a Google Map so you can get an idea of what the area looks like now. The announcement of this collection notes that a lot of these sites and monuments have fallen into disrepair or have vanished completely.
In addition to the photographs, there is also a biography of the photographer and a list of sites where the pictures were taken.
I have no idea why these images resonate with me so much. They seem almost haunted, but at the same time they occupy a landscape that is determined to be ordinary (note the imposing exterior of the St. Mary Pammakaristos, before its restoration, with what looks like a string of laundry in the foreground. I’m not much of a critic in these matters but I think it might also be that Artamonoff was a pretty damn good photographer — he was able to take both detailed and long-range pictures without losing any context.
The collection is small enough to browse; if the images themselves were larger this collection would be absolutely incredible. As it is it is well worth a visit if you’re at all interested in history or archaelogy.
Congress, Maryland, Google, Ireland, More: Morning Buzz, January 23, 2012
Hey, The White House is on Google+!
Google Operating System takes a look at searching Google for punctuation marks and other special symbols.
GOS also notes that you can still find Google Code Search… you just have to know where to look.
The state of Maryland has created an online database of business incentives. “… an online database of the financial incentives that the state provides to companies when they promise to create jobs, open new facilities or otherwise contribute to the economy.”
Wow! A huge roundup of new APIs from ProgrammableWeb.
Congressional Facebook Hackathon: the report.
Archives.com has added a bunch of vital records.
News on Ireland’s national library going digital.
Check out Apple’s press release on its new offerings.
Who’s going to team up with National Geographic for a digital archive? Why, it’s Gale! Good morning, Internet…
Gemini Spacecraft Digital Archive Now Available
Arizona State University announced last week the launch (no pun intended) of the new Project Gemini Online Digital Archive, an online archive of NASA’s Gemini spacecraft flights. (From the announcement: “Project Gemini (1964-1966) was the second United States human spaceflight program, after Project Mercury (1960-1963). The overarching goal was to test systems and operations critical to the Apollo program (1961-1975), conceived with the purpose of ‘landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth’.” The archive is available at http://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu/.
from the front page you’ll see that there’s already an archive for Project Mercury. The Gemini gallery is divided by each of the ten missions, from Gemini III to Gemini XII. I looked at the Gemini VII archive. The pictures here were presented in a slideshow, black and white pictures first. Most of the pictures were shots of Earth, some with captions (“India, Madras State, Ceylon, Adam’s Bridge, Palk Straits”) and some without. All of them had downloads available, from low resolution to the raw image (the one I downloaded was a 58MB .TIF)
If you look at the top nav bar for the image gallery, you’ll see a pulldown menu called Gemini. This menu will give you background on the missions, information about the images and how they were processed, and a short list of more resources about the Gemini missions. There’s also a link to a page of “movies” — highlights of the best pictures from each mission made into Quicktime movies. This is probably the best way to get all the image highlights.
Unless you know a lot more about astronomy than I do, start with the background and the movies before going in for an archive browse. A great collection but I needed more context to get started enjoying it.
Guggenheim Exhibition Catalogues, Now Digitized
Hat tip to The Spectator for the article about a digitized collection of exhibition catalogs from the Guggenheim Museum. The collection is available at http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/publications/from-the-archives.
There are over 60 catalogs here, and when you sort by date you’ll start with “Amazons of the Avant-Garde” (1999) and end up at “Art of Tomorrow: Fourty-One Reproductions from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for Non-Objective Painting” (1940). The listings contain a thumbnail of the catalogue cover, author, date of publication, and number of pages.
I clicked on the “More” listing for “Mastercraftsmen of Ancient Peru,” by Alan R. Sawyer (1968, 112 pages). I got a larger image of the cover and a brief excerpt of the book, with a “Read Catalogue Online” link. THAT took me to a Flash-based reading application. Navigation of the book at the bottom, double-click to zoom in (to read the text you will have to zoom in.) Double-click again to zoom out. When I was looking at it, it looked like the reader was on “auto-play” — so you’d be looking at some page and it would flip. You can turn that off by clicking the “pause” button on the nav bar. If you don’t want to bother with the nav bar you can also flip through the pages by clicking on page corners.
The bottom of the listing has books related to the catalogue you’re viewing as well as related essays. I’m not sure where “Aestheticism and Japan: The Cult of the Orient” intersects with ancient Peruvian crafts, but I can find out if I pay $1.99 for this 13-page ebook.
An absolute timesink. If you don’t want to do the reading on the Guggenheim site, you can download a large selection of texts — more, it seems to me, than there are at the Guggenheim site — at the Internet Archive. This includes downloading in Kindle, Daisy, and PDF format.
Congress, Yahoo, Art, More: Morning Buzz, January 19, 2012
Hey! The Congressional Record is now an iPad app! (Free of course.)
The Connecticut Judicial Branch is now using Twitter. (PDF press release, sorry.)
Hmm. The AP has revised its Twitter guidelines. Again.
As you probably heard, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang has resigned. (Yahoo press release.) Very sad day.
Lovely! Zsombor Jékely has an overview of recently-launched medieval art websites. Good stuff Zsombor!
The CDC has created a new web site with state-level disability data.
Oh, wow, hmm. I don’t think ResearchBuzz will be covering this search engine.
TechTarget has launched a new Web site — SearchSolidStateStorage.com. (Press release.)
By the way, it’s the day after the SOPA blackout protests. By all means, let’s continue to talk about SOPA. But let’s also talk about the really awful Research Works Act. Good morning, Internet…
Google, Cars, Fossils: Morning Buzz, January 17, 2012
There’s a new Q&A site to compete with Quora! Beepl is now out of private beta.
Temple University has a new archive chronicling the civil rights movement in Philadelphia.
Soon to be an online museum! “Darwin’s fossils rediscovered in cabinet”.
Stanford is going to digitize the Collier Collection. “The collection’s library owns 1 million items — rooms and rooms of archives. Those include every issue of some magazines, such as the hard-cover auto historian’s bible, Automotive Quarterly, and the first edition of the early British racing journal, Autocar.”
Google’s been busy mapping campuses! Yesterday I read announcements from SF State and the University of Delaware. (Nice pic, UD!)
Also speaking of Google: it’s teaming up with the World Bank.
Ever wanted to ask something of the US Department of State? Here’s your chance. Good morning, Internet…
State of Maine Releases Database of Prisoners and Probationers
The state of Maine has made publicly available a database of adult prisoners and probationers in the state. It is available here.
You can search for people in an incredible variety of ways, not just by name but also by eye or hair color, offense type, physical characteristic (scar, tattoo, etc.), height range, weight range, or type of offense.
I did a search and found that 38 adult prisoners and probationers in the state of Maine have, according to this database, blue hair. But I also found out that the data probably need to be checked. Most the records I looked at showed people who did not have blue hair. In many cases the eyes were listed as blue and the hair as blue also. Now some of people might have grown their hair out — but I very much doubt that the 50+ guy with the DUI, no tattoos or distinguishing markings, has or had blue hair. Just seems unusual. (Searches for pink and orange hair, a color which is generally not associated with eye color, found zero people. A search for purple hair found one person. Meanwhile a search for green hair found seven people. Go figure.)
Anyway, search results include a MDOC number, name, picture (most of the time, and even for people who are on probation), date of birth, race and gender, earliest date possible for release from supervision, and “Location,” which appears to be a metro area, not a specific address/city.
Individual profiles have a larger picture, physical description, convictions (not, the database notes, a complete criminal history), and whatever conditions necessary for their supervision (no alcohol, drug testing, etc.)
