Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

Saturday Sharing is nothing if not eclectic. Just poke around today's edition to see what I mean. You'll find a noisy zoo of letters, a digitized Yeats manuscript, a site paying homage to the great poet Mahmoud Darwish, a map of counties that use different terms to describe carbonated beverages, a call for virtual volunteers at Smithsonian Gardens, and Adam Ryder's architectural atlas. For good measure, I've thrown in a video of a collaboration to produce an e-book using some highly developed HTML and Java Script.

✦ Children's picture books are high-tech these days. Case in point: Bembo's Zoo by graphic designer Roberto deVicq de Cumptich. You'll need Flash to see the abecdary of animals, each one a combination of Bembo letterforms and punctuation marks. Go here and after the gates open and the noise fades, click on a letter. But pay attention. An animal only holds the screen for a few seconds. Oh, and note this, too: Every time you swipe your mouse across the screen, you'll elicit an animal's voice, or at some point, perhaps Tarzan's. (My thanks to SFMoMA's blog, Open Space, where I saw the link.)

deVicq Blog

At The Type Directors Club: deVicq's "How to Make Love to Your Type" (Interactive), a promotional book also featured in Communications Arts design annual.

✦ Fans of William Butler Yeats will be heartened to learn there's a Love and Death manuscript archives online, courtesy of Boston College Libraries. You may view both the original manuscript and a transcription.

✦ Among poets, one in particular is a favorite of mine: the late Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Darwish. Recently, I learned through the Being blog that the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies created a site, "The Legacy of Mahmoud Darwish" for its 2009 conference of international writers and scholars honoring the writer's life and work. On the site are a number of readings of Darwish's work, as well as podcasts, including a lecture by the eminent translator and poet Dr. Fady Joudah.

Selected Poems and Translations by Fady Joudah

✦ You can find anything on the Web. One new example: The Great Pop vs. Soda Controversy, where you can learn which regions of English-speaking North America use the terms "Pop", "Soda", and "Coke" to describe their carbonated soft drinks. It's a legitimate research project of professor Greg Plumb of East Central University in Oklahoma and Matthew Campbell, who have created a map of generic names for soft drinks by county (click on an area to find your county). A table of statistics by state is here. Submissions came primarily from readers of the Web page. A conclusion: "People who say 'Pop' are much, much cooler." Unbiased? You be the judge. And are you wondering why knowing these terms matter? The one-word answer is metadata. Professional cataloguers who know everyday language are better equipped to create descriptive meaningful information (data tags) that allow you and me to find what we're looking for while doing an online search. (My thanks to the Smithsonian Collections Blog for this item.)

✦ The "Great Pop vs. Soda Controversy" may be settled but the Mystery Gardens Project is far from completed. Smithsonian Gardens needs your help tagging more than 80,000 images in the Archives of American Gardens. Go here and become a virtual volunteer. There are rock, vegetable, urban, herb, rose, community, historic, and formal gardens and greenhouses to describe.

Smithsonian Gardens Map

✦ Photographer Adam Ryder gives you an inside look at his new book Areth: An Architectual Atlas, the fourth edition in his series Areth Analyzed, which documents architectural forms across three geographic regions: Northern Mountains, Central Basin, and Great Barrens.

Adam Ryder on Saatchi Online

✦ Here's Walrus Studio's video demo of ePub3, which shows a digital collaboration project with French publisher MNEMOS for Kadath. Digital publishing clearly is growing more sophisticated. (My thanks to my Twitter friend Connie aka Peepsqueak for this item.)

Walrus Epub Demo#3 - Kadath from Walrus Books on Vimeo.