"When you send a text message on the Verizon network, you can address your text by choosing a name out of your contact list, or you can address it by typing in a phone number. You can also type in a name. And if you type in L-E-I-L-A, then—bizarrely—your text will come to me.
This is a blog about the texts I have received. All of them are from strangers, intended for other Leilas, but obviously they missed their marks."
posted by danb
on Dec 2, 2010 -
48 comments
The continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts. In place of the long-term view of technological transformations, which underlies the common notion that we have just entered a new era, the information age, I want to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable. Let's begin with the Internet and work backward in time.
The Library in the New Age by Robert Darnton, historian and Director of the Harvard Library. A wide-ranging overview of the status of libraries in the modern world, touching on such subjects as: journalist poker games, French people liking the smell of books, bibliography at Google, news dissemination in the 18th Century, book piracy and the different texts of Shakespeare. Some responses:
Defending the Library of Google,
The Future in the Past and
Librarians Need a Better Apologetic.
posted by Kattullus
on Jun 1, 2008 -
22 comments
The Illuminated Middle Ages database presents several hundred recently digitized illuminated texts from French national library collections.This web site gives access to the entire database. Only a portion of the full collection has been translated into English for the web site, but visitors may also view the French-language galleries in the site, where a dozen texts from each of the ten themes are presented daily. You are sure to enjoy this collection of breathtaking texts dating from the year 500 through the 1400s.
posted by hortense
on Jun 9, 2005 -
19 comments
Greg Lindahl presents scans and transcriptions of several early modern texts at his
website: for example, there are partly-searchable facsmilies of John Florio's
New World of Words, an Italian-English dictionary published in 1611, and, from the same year, Randle Cotgrave's
Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. Also, there are manuals on
swordsmanship,
dance,
cookery,
brewing and
needlework.
posted by misteraitch
on Sep 16, 2004 -
7 comments
