Category Archives: News
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.
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.
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.)
Gigablast Founder Matt Wells is Back With FlurbiT, an Event Search Engine
Longtime search engine wonks will remember Gigablast from back in the day as one of the lesser-known search engines with a huge, huge page index and a scrappy founder named Matt Wells. If you weren’t looking at search engines too often then, here’s some backstory.
Gigablast is still around, but Matt is focusing on a new project now with the recent launch of a site called FlurbiT, available at http://flurbit.com/. FlurbiT bills itself as “the largest event search engine in the U.S.”, which it probably is, considering that FlurbiT mines the open, unstructured Web for event information.
From the front page you can go and browse for available events, or you can do a search for specific types of events within a given radius of a place. I decided to look for daily events within 30 miles of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Once you run a search you like, you can save it as an RSS feed.
I did not get a result count, but the results were broken out by date. Because I searched for things that were happening on a daily basis, there were a lot of repeats. Samples of mined events included a day camp, several zoo presentations, and an exercise program.
Almost immediately the issue of the mined data became apparent. For example, a daily exercise event does occur — but is open only to members of Absentee Shawnee Tribe, tribal employees, and Native Americans in surrounding counties. A daily appearance by Ben “Cooter” Jones actually took place in 2007. It would be good if there was an easy way to report when events have expired, are restricted in certain ways, or are otherwise different from their single-line presentation.
I tried another search, this time for events occuring weekly within 30 miles of Decatur, Illinois. This group of results was much better with events including Toastmasters, Church events, 8-ball tournaments, and martial arts classes. There were still erroneous/odd listings, however.
Each listing has a page showing the relevant, mined data with a map, and a highlighted version of the original event page so you can easily see the context for the event.
Should you find a set of event search results you really like, you can get a widget to add them to your own Web site. And you don’t have to rely on FlurbiT’s mining to get your event right; you can submit an event instead.
Trying to datamine the unstructured Web is a difficult, thankless job, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody that there are erroneous results on FlurbiT. Having a simple mechanism to report incorrect listings would help a lot, and remove the chaff from what is already a large, potentially useful database of events.
King Center Imaging Project Goes Live with Martin Luther King Jr. Archive
Last week a press release announced that JPMorgan Chase & Co., in partnership with AT&T Business Solutions, EMC, and The King Center, would release The King Center Imaging Project’s Web site on January 16 to note and celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It appears to be live now and is available at http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/. While I think this is a great project for an archive, I found it somewhat hard to use as it is initially presented.
When you first go to the archive, you’ll be presented with some pull-down menus and a tile display of historical documents. The tiles are slow to load, and more have to load as you scroll down the screen. If you hold your mouse over a particular tile (which may show an image or a snippet of a letter or something else) you’ll get some explanation, but often, the image or the snippet aren’t enough. (One image, for an issue of Current, is just a block of the cover with no image or lettering.)
Thankfully you can turn this off by going to the top nav and choosing the “List” display, which makes for much easier browsing. You can go through a huge list of documents on the front page, or use the nav to choose different themes of Dr. King’s life. Themes include Economics, Letters from Children, Nobel Peace Prize, and Telegrams. (Items archived range from pictures to articles to sermons to oral histories to poetry.) I looked at Telegrams, turned off the tile display in favor of the list display again, and reviewed several dozen telegrams both to and from Dr. King. The listings include a brief description and a thumbnail; date and place are also listed when available.
Clicking on an item takes you to the item page with it in full view along with tools to zoom in, print, and share. A left nav gives you additional information on the item, including a link to a transcript and tags in several different categories, making browsing very specific topics easy. Individual items are as simple as a picture or a single telegram, and as complex as an entire issue of Current magazine. The tools and information on the single-item pages are elegant and easy to use.
In addition to browsing categories, there’s also a general search engine. I did a search for birthday card (since browsing had pointed me to a couple) and found six results. If you want to run a more serious search, there’s an advanced search mechanism that allows you to narrow your results in a variety of ways, including by date span, person or organization (the search engine will give you suggestions), or type of content (sermons, telegrams, correspondence, etc.)
I found the initial tile display of the archived items to be very slow loading and lacking context. Once I switched to the list format, it was a lot easier to get into the archives’ extensive content. As today is Martin Luther King Jr. day I suspect the site will be a bit of a slow load for a while, but it’s very worth a visit.
Google Launches “Search Plus Your World” (If Your World Is Google+)
Google announced yesterday a new initiative, Search Plus Your World. This from the announcement:
Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.
“Wow,” I thought, “they’ve partnered with Facebook and Twitter! Social searching is finally going to suck less!” (I really missed it when Twitter stopped showing up in Google’s results.)
No. The “Your World” to which Google refers is the world of Google+. And I don’t know about you, but when I think of “My World” in relation to Google+, I think of one of those horrible cheap Star Trek sets with fake polystyrene rocks. Don’t get me wrong, I use Google+ — I just use other social networks a lot more.
Anyway, let’s get on with it. Google is announcing three new things, which you will see if you’re logged in to Google and doing a search.
Personal Results
Personal results take results from your Google+ circles and make them available from the Google search results page. For example, I just did a search for “polystyrene” to make sure I spelled it correctly (which I did, first try. Scary.) A regular search has 3.6 million results, while a “personal results” search has a dozen or so.
The results come from shared content on Google+ which in this case looked to be mostly articles, one going back to 2004. I used some of the search options on the left nav to try to narrow down my results and was able to narrow down by date and by content type (images, etc.) Google was smart enough to remove the 2004 article from the personalized results when I searched for content within the last year, even though it had been shared only a few months before.
Profiles in Search
Profiles in Search is just what it sounds like. Run a person search and if they have a Google profile it’ll pop up. The example on the screen shot shows Matt Cutts and his profile. You’ll notice a green bar next to his name; that’s the Google+ circle in which I have Matt (“Journalists and Cool People.”) In addition to the basic Google+ profile you’ll also get recent content from Google+, including a picture of Matt wearing a horse mask.
People and Pages
If you’re not searching for people but rather for a specific topic or community, Google might point you to people or circles on Google+. I did a search for WordPress and didn’t see anything in the personal results. However, in the regular results I got a right sidebar of people related to the topic of WordPress. You can click on the “see more” under that listing and get a listing of people and pages related to WordPress.
(Even when you’re not looking at personal results you’ll see a lot of personalized search mentions in your results. You can turn those off with a small icon that’s located at the extreme right of the results page. It lets you turn personalized results on and off.)
This is a skimming of the surface of this functionality, because in looking at it I was struck more by what isn’t here by what is. If you want a deep discussion of the new features along with discussion about privacy implications, Danny’s got a great post.
Search Plus Arrogance
“Google is assuming that all relevant content I want is on Google itself?” I thought after reading the announcement. “How very 2004 of it.”
“My World” is nothing like just Google+. But it isn’t just Facebook, either, which was my reflexive response. I got to thinking about the kind of content that I would find useful to be able to search on a personalized basis in the elegant but unfortunately very limited way that Google does offer.
My World is Facebook. And Twitter. And Quora. And LinkedIn Questions. And Pinterest. And Instagram. And I’m sure that list will increase over time. Right now the idea of being able to search Quora, Facebook, and Twitter content easily from one interface like Google has set up makes me ridiculously happy. But I’m equally sure that two years down the road there will be another social network or gathering place or aggregation tool that I just can’t do without. My point is that any framework which provides a limited amount of personalized content from a limited number of networks is going to be a disappointment and ultimately fail; a more open framework should be the goal.
The good news is that there is already a tool that can index information from several different Web sites and display it in one place — it’s called a SEARCH ENGINE. The bad news is that there are several roadblocks, some legitimate and understandable (privacy concerns, technical issues) and some messy (political slapfighting) that stand between us and a search that truly represents “Our World.”
