MetaFilter posts tagged with archives

Reel 2 Real: Sound at the Pitt Rivers Museum

carter — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:46:27 -0800

Reel 2 Real: Sound at the Pitt Rivers Museum is a digitization project that is taking the archival field recordings of the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford University's museum of ethnography and anthropology), digitizing them, and placing them online with Soundcloud. I've been trying to figure out collections structure and permissions, without much success. But there are some themed collections (e.g. these BayAka recordings, and some downloads available. But I just pressed 'play' on SoundCloud, and took it from the top. Bonus if you are in Oxford: The official launch is on Wednesday March 20th, 4.30 - 7.30 p.m., when project staff will discuss the digitization, curation, and hosting of the materials.

Archaeology on the Information Superhighway

frimble — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 12:39:12 -0800

Websites from the 90s and early 2000s that are alive, but unupdated. As a starting point, The You've Got Mail website is still alive, in all its late-90s glory. (Warning: Flash, sound, animation) (Previously, Previously, Previously)

The uncanny beauty of decayed Daguerreotypes

Horace Rumpole — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 09:21:22 -0800

Daguerreotype portraits were made by the model posing (often with head fixed in place with a clamp to keep it still the few minutes required) before an exposed light-sensitive silvered copper plate, which was then developed by mercury fumes and fixed with salts. This fixing however was far from permanent – like the people they captured the images too were subject to change and decay. They were extremely sensitive to scratches, dust, hair, etc, and particularly the rubbing of the glass cover if the glue holding it in place deteriorated. As well as rubbing, the glass itself can also deteriorate and bubbles of solvent explode upon the image.

Letter From America archives replenished by Newquay man.

feelinglistless — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 09:20:25 -0800

BBC's Letter From America archives replenished by Newquay man. Most not kept by the BBC. Amazing piece of radio in and of itself. [previously].

Ephemeral New York

zarq — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 06:02:34 -0800

Ephemeral New York 'chronicles an ever-changing, constantly reinvented city through photos, newspaper archives, and other scraps and artifacts that have been edged into New York’s collective remainder bin.' You can browse by category on the right. Notable: * Cool Building Names * Out-of-Date Guidebooks * Random Signage * Sketchy Hotels * Disasters and Crimes * Urban Beauty * War Memorials * Houses of Worship * New York Street * Old Print Ads * Music, Art, Theater * Queens * Transit Pages from Ephemeral New York have been linked in some fantastic posts, previously on MetaFilter.

Gentlemen Who Lunch

Horace Rumpole — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 11:16:34 -0800

It's one of the best-known photographs in US history, but the fearless steelworkers dining al fresco in "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper" have remained anonymous in the 80 years since it was taken. A new documentary. Men At Lunch, tells the story of the photo and identifies two of its subjects for the first time.

Wonders Of The World (Wide Web)

Bora Horza Gobuchul — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 13:26:32 -0800

The Google Cultural Institute is the portal for an effort to digitally preserve and present vital historical information using the latest web technologies. Highlights include the World Wonders Project, a geographical tour of UNESCO Heritage sites; Google Art Project (previously), curating 50,000 years of human cultural expression; the Palace of Versailles in 3D and a digital archive of the Dead Sea Scrolls (previously)

The Grateful Dead Archive Online

gyusan — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 17:00:42 -0800

UC Santa Cruz announced today the launch of the Grateful Dead Archive Online. It contains over 25,000 digitized items - posters & photographs, audio & video, t-shirts, envelope art... you can even contribute your own content.

Dr. Livingstone's diary deciphered

Horace Rumpole — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 08:41:53 -0800

For more than two years, scholars and imaging scientists have been using advanced scanning techniques to recover the mostly illegible contents of an 1871 field diary kept by the British explorer David Livingstone in Africa. Low on paper and ink, the explorer had resorted to writing on newspaper sheets, with ink made from berries, and over time the original document had become almost impossible to read. Now the team has unveiled an online “multispectral critical edition” with images, transcriptions, and relevant notes, making Livingstone’s first-person account accessible again. They’ve also created a “Livingstone Spectral Images Archive” to give anyone who wants it direct access to the images, transcriptions, and metadata the project has created, no strings attached. Almost everything in both the edition and the archive comes with a Creative Commons license that allows the contents to be reused with attribution. Previously. The challenges faced and techniques used on this project are quite similar to those used to decipher writing a thousand years older, the Archimedes Palimpsest.

5-3-1852: Prince Albert still won't get out of the can

Horace Rumpole — Thu, 24 May 2012 06:25:27 -0800

The diaries of Queen Victoria, totaling 47,000 pages and running from the age of 13 until her death, have been digitized. The site will be free to UK users, but open access for the rest of the world only runs through the end of June.

"An obscure world of celluloid intrigue"

bubukaba — Wed, 09 May 2012 13:02:53 -0800

"At a time when most old films were still protected by copyright and studios were urging the FBI to prosecute individuals owning copyrighted films, movie collecting was a largely underground and somewhat dangerous activity." In 1977, for example, a 20 year old film collector was visited by the FBI. The agents, posing as fellow collectors, entered his home and seized his collection. His case wasn't unique. Even the stars — most famously, Roddy McDowall — were subject to the legal wrath of the very studios they worked for. Still, some collectors got away with it (including one J. D. Salinger). Though the FBI raids still haunt the collective memory of the hobby, the world has become much safer for film collectors, perhaps because the industry realized — as early as the late '70s — that "as tape and other systems of recording proliferate, film companies will gradually lose control over their product". Today, celebrity collectors like Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese are known publicly as such (and non-celebrity collectors with colorful personalities get profiled by The Guardian). Collector-oriented festivals like Cinecon, Cinevent, Cinesation, and Cinefest are thriving. Film archivists — notably, Harvard Film Archive, home of the Doc Burr Collection — are interested in them. And some young collectors [previously] have styled themselves as archivists, complete with home preservation projects [previously]. And of course, they're all over the internet, showing off their collections on YouTube, posting pictures of their sweet set-ups, writing how-to websites, and buying and selling on Ebay and assorted private forums.

I can see my Grandma from here

Horace Rumpole — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 08:51:40 -0800

The U.S. National Archives today released the returns from the 1940 national census, providing an invaluable resource to historians and genealogists. At the moment, you'll need to know the particular address you want to see--the records are not yet searchable by name. A companion project seeks to fix that by enlisting your help in a crowdsourced project to index the census data. However, if you're looking for a New York address, you can use this clever site from the New York Public Library to look someone up in the 1940 phone book. (FYI, the site seems to be running a bit sluggishly under first-day load, so you may need to be patient.)

“Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”

infini — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:01:37 -0800

The Nelson Mandela Digital Archive has gone live. The archive organizes Mandela’s papers chronologically and thematically. You can jump into sections covering his Early Life, Prison Years, and Presidential Years, or explore his extensive book collections and work with youngsters or see his first recorded interview from 1961. (via)

"The future for digital storage is constant migration."

mediareport — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:38:53 -0800

"Most of the filmmakers surveyed...were not aware of the perishable nature of digital content or how short its unmanaged lifespan is." After the Motion Picture Academy's release last month of "The Digital Dilemma 2," a warning aimed at independent filmmakers and nonprofit archives, cinematographer John Bailey talks with one of the report's authors about the perils of data migration ("It’s not unreasonable to say that the term "digital preservation" is an oxymoron") and the need to educate filmmakers who are so "enamored with the perceived benefits of digital image capture and workflow" that they fail to realize preservation concerns start to appear almost immediately after their work is completed. Film professor David Bordwell covers the report in a detailed post about preserving "born-digital" films, sixth in his "Pandora's Digital Box" series about the worldwide conversion to digital projection, with lots of good links at the bottom.

Rokurokkubi (a long-necked monster)

codacorolla — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 19:43:26 -0800

"This site is a catalogue raisonné of the art of Utagawa Kuniyoshi. It contains over 5,000 images, counting multi-sheet compositions as single images. An undertaking such as this can never be considered complete..." An archive of the work of Utagawa Kuniyoshi, a 19th century print maker from Japan. Some highlights include sumo wrestlers, triptychs from Genji, the Zodiac, and Tanuki having fun (slightly NSFW). [_{Via Pink Tentacle.}] In addition to digital copies of the prints, the site also holds links to information about Kuniyoshi's work, including:

A bibliography of reference resources,
a brief biography,
a glossary of terms,
a guide to this genre of print (ukiyo-e),
Kuniyoshi's evolving signature,
and a guide to Japanese print publishers...

this post

Bibliographia

Bora Horza Gobuchul — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 20:05:05 -0800

Today Cambridge University offered a complete free digital archive of the personal papers of Sir Isaac Newton, including the Principa Mathematica and his first published research paper. The archives join a number of efforts to open original works of scientific greatness to the world:

Charles Darwin's entire personal library, complete with annotations and handwritten marginalia, digitized, indexed, and searchable, part of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (previously)
Mapping The Republic of Letters and Electronic Enlightenment, wonderful sites showing the communication and social connections of Enlightenment writers.

Newton's original works are handily supplemented by The Newton Project, showing the man's insertions and deletions to his own work.

T-Dot

netbros — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 16:40:38 -0800

The history of Toronto in photos is 90 some odd posts linked to provide a thematically organized visual overview. The vast majority of the photographs featured derive from the Toronto Archives. Should you be interested in a less visually oriented take on Toronto history, there is also the Nostalgia Tripping series, which was designed to be a bit more about storytelling than just the photos.

Perhaps you will discover some new Christmas favourites this year?

bubukaba — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:43:43 -0800

"Once more we're starting to look forward to Christmas. Whilst the shops are advertising all the material things we can look foward to, we're despatching enjoyment in the form of music - treasures from Christmases gone by." - musical advent calendars from the Norwegian Institute for Recorded Sound.

This post contains Seasonal CBC awesome - Happy [safe] (upcoming) Holidays - Just Saying

infinite intimation — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:53:46 -0800

This year the CBC Massey Lectures celebrates fifty years with bestselling author, essayist, cultural observer, and famed New Yorker contributor Adam Gopnik. His subject is winter - the season, the space, the cycle. Gopnik takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who helped shape a new and modern idea of winter. Listen to Winter: Five Windows on the Season Streaming files for this years lecture will be available until Friday, November 18. However, this year, departing from recent years, the CBC is sharing far more than just the current lecture from this year... The CBC has commissioned the annual Massey Lectures since 1961. They were unveiled in late February by the vice-president and general manager of English networks at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), H.G. Walker. "Each year," he said in the press release announcing the series, "the CBC will invite a noted scholar to undertake study or original research in his field and present the results in a series of half-hour radio broadcasts." He continued, saying that he hoped the lectures would "make significant contributions to public awareness and understanding and... further development of the art of broadcasting." The lectures were named for Vincent Massey, who had recently completed a seven-year term as Governor General of Canada. Massey is notable as the first Canadian to hold the post, but it was work he did before becoming Governor General that inspired the CBC to name the new lecture series after him. In 1949, Vincent Massey had been appointed by the government of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent to head a royal commission mandated to carry out a sweeping study of "the entire field of letters, the arts and sciences within the jurisdiction of the federal state." Grandly named the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, it came to be known more simply as the "Massey Commission." Its scope included science, literature, the arts, music, drama, film and broadcasting. The Commission held hearings across the country. It listened to testimony from more than a thousand witnesses and received 462 written submissions. It took two years to do its work and issued its final report in 1951 [Some express a desire to revisit the findings of the commission report]. Today, the CBC Massey Lectures are the product of a collaboration of three partners--CBC Radio, the House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the University of Toronto. For most of their history, the Massey Lectures were recorded within the austere confines of a radio studio in Toronto. But since 2002, they have been delivered each fall before large audiences on university campuses in cities across Canada. The lectures are broadcast each November on CBC Radio One, are streamed worldwide on the internet and are available as podcasts and audio CDs. The lectures are published as a trade paperback that garners international attention and usually makes the best seller lists. The CBC Massey Lectures have established their place as a Canadian institution and an annual highlight of our national intellectual life. The 2010 CBC Massey Lectures, "Player One: What is to Become of Us" -Coupland, Douglas The 2009 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World" -Davis, Wade The 2008 CBC Massey Lectures, "Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth" -Atwood, Margaret The 2007 CBC Massey Lectures, "The City of Words" -Manguel, Alberto The 2006 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Ethical Imagination" -Somerville, Margaret The 2005 CBC Massey Lectures, "Race Against Time" -Lewis, Stephen The 2004 CBC Massey Lectures, "A Short History of Progress" -Wright, Ronald The 2003 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative" -King, Thomas The 2002 CBC Massey Lectures, "Beyond Fate" -Visser, Margaret The 2001 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Cult of Efficiency" -Gross Stein, Janice The 2000 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Rights Revolution" -Ignatieff, Michael The 1999 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Triumph of Narrative - Storytelling in an Age of Mass Culture" -Fulford, Robert The 1998 CBC Massey Lectures, "Becoming Human" -Vanier, Jean The 1997 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Elsewhere Community" -Kenner, Hugh The 1995 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Unconscious Civilization" -Ralston Saul, John The 1994 CBC Massey Lectures, "On The Eve of the Millennium" -Cruise O'Brien, Conor The 1993 CBC Massey Lectures, "Democracy on Trial" -Bethke Elshtain, Jean The 1992 CBC Massey Lectures, "Twenty-First Century Capitalism" -Heilbroner, Robert The 1991 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Malaise of Modernity" -Taylor, Charles (Related) The 1990 CBC Massey Lectures, "Biology As Ideology"- Lewontin, Richard The 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Real World of Technology" -Franklin, Ursula M. The 1988 CBC Massey Lectures, "Necessary Illlusions" -Chomsky, Noam The 1987 CBC Massey Lectures, "Compassion and Solidarity" -Baum, Gregory The 1985 CBC Massey Lectures, "Prisons We Choose to Live Inside" -Lessing, Doris The 1984 CBC Massey Lectures, "Latin America: At War With The Past" -Fuentes, Carlos The 1983 CBC Massey Lectures, "Globalism and The Nation State" -Kierans, Eric The 1982 CBC Massey Lectures, "Indefensible Weapons" -Lifton, Robert Jay and Falk, Richard The 1981 CBC Massey Lectures, "Dangers & Options: The Matter of World Survival" -Brandt, Willy The 1979 CBC Massey Lectures, "Canadian Cities and Sovereignty Association" -Jacobs, Jane The 1978 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Inadvertent Epic: From Uncle Tom to Roots -Fiedler, Leslie The 1977 CBC Massey Lectures, "Myth and Meaning" -Lévi Strauss, Claude The 1974 CBC Massey Lectures, "Nostalgia for the Absolute" -Steiner, George The 1973 CBC Massey Lectures, "Designing Freedom" -Beer, Stafford The 1972 CBC Massey Lectures, "Inscape and Landscape" -Dansereau, Pierre The 1971 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Power of Law" -Corry, James The 1969 CBC Massey Lectures, "Time As History" -Grant, George The 1968 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Politics of Family" -Laing, R.D. The 1967 CBC Massey Lectures, "Conscience for Change" -Luther King, Martin The 1966 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Moral Ambiguity of America" -Goodman, Dr. Paul The 1965 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Underdeveloped Country" -Kenneth Galbraith, John The 1964 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Real World of Democracy" -Macpherson, C. B. The 1963 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Image of Confederation" -Underhill, Frank The 1962 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Educated Imagination" -Frye, Northrup The 1961 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Rich Nations and The Poor Nations" -Ward, Barbara

Pasadena, Where the Grass is Greena!

Ideefixe — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 10:12:51 -0800

Pasadena's visual history is digitized. Pasadena, California, fabled in song and story, has a rich visual history from the Rose Parade to Caltech to the Doo-Dah Parade which is now being digitized by the Pasadena Digital History Collaboration, a consortium of cultural institutions, including the Huntington Library, the Pasadena Public Library and Pasadena City College. They're asking for the public's help in identifying photos in a Flickr group.

People tend to forget

Potomac Avenue — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 09:28:47 -0800

'“The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975“ is an incredible documentary with an equally incredible story behind it. The film is constructed entirely from hundreds of hours of archival footage of the black power movement, footage that’s not just rare, but unseen; it was shot by a Swedish news crew in the 1960s and 1970s, then left untouched in a Swedish TV station’s cellar for 30 years, where it was discovered by documentary filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson.' Clips. Angela Davis. Interview with Danny Glover.

Most everyone visits his shop to have a look at his queer door

Horace Rumpole — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 17:59:53 -0800

Anyone who was anyone in the literary world of 1920s New York signed the door of Frank Shay's Christopher Street bookshop. The door is now in the collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, and they'd like your help identifying the remaining unknown signatures.

Let Facts be submitted to a candid world

Rhaomi — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 09:22:00 -0800

The Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most masterfully written state paper of Western civilization. As Moses Coit Tyler noted almost a century ago, no assessment of it can be complete without taking into account its extraordinary merits as a work of political prose style. Although many scholars have recognized those merits, there are surprisingly few sustained studies of the stylistic artistry of the Declaration. This essay seeks to illuminate that artistry by probing the discourse microscopically -- at the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable. The University of Wisconsin's Dr. Stephen E. Lucas meticulously analyzes the elegant language of the 235-year-old charter in a distillation of this comprehensive study. More on the Declaration: full transcript and ultra-high-resolution scan, a transcript and scan of Jefferson's annotated rough draft, the little-known royal rebuttal, a thorough history of the parchment itself, a peek at the archival process, a reading of the document by the people of NPR and by a group of prominent actors, H. L. Mencken's "American" translation, Slate's Twitter summaries, and a look at the fates of the 56 signers.

The Newspaper Map

Bora Horza Gobuchul — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 10:52:40 -0800

The Newspaper Map: browse thousands of local, regional and national newspapers from around the world, based on geographical location. Filter and translate languages, see newspaper archives back to the early 19th century, and find fourth estate Twitter and YouTube feeds. A mobile version is also available. via

Archivist Asseblage Art

cross_impact — Wed, 25 May 2011 07:31:17 -0800

"Collections wrap bare objects with cultural identity." Smithsonian archivist turned assemblage artist Tracy Hicks finds the seam between two things I didn't think were related -- dispassionate taxonomy and artistic whims. You can catch Hicks' installation at the American Association of Museums conference showing his interpretation of the future of museums (if by "future" you mean a Lovecraftian dystopia.) I saw him at the AAM's Future of Museums Conference. Thought he was interesting. That is all.