Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

In today's edition of Saturday Sharing, you'll learn about a mobile print shop dubbed the "Sweetheart of the Road", the beautifully visual language of the Noun Project, the IndieGoGo platform for fundraising, and a selection of music-related Websites, including the marvelous Hymnary that boasts more than 1 million published hymns, scores, and media files.

✦ Collecting, augmenting, and organizing the recognizable symbols that comprise visual language that can be readily understood across cultures are the objectives of The Noun Project. The free-to-use symbols of objects and ideas are simple, well-designed works of art, any of which may be explored by language and category (animals, food, people, science, weather, and more). (My thanks to The New Yorker's The Book Bench, where I first saw the link.)

✦ Fans of letterpress will want to catch the "Sweetheart of the Road" when it passes through town. A retrofitted 1982 Chevy Step Van, the truck functions as a print shop on wheels and is traveling the countryside, and even going into Canada, to present Moveable Type workshops and other events in schools, city parks, libraries, community centers, art galleries, street fairs, farms and farmers markets, universities, backyards, and anywhere a vehicle may go. Miles traveled and places visited are documented online.

The brainchild of Power and Light letterpress and design studio in Portland, Oregon, Moveable Type's aim is to demonstrate the tools and craft of typesetting and hand-printing; the truck is equipped with a fully fuctioning table-top press and a  larger proof press. Operated by Power and Light's Kyle Durrie, who speaks with infectious delight about printing, Moveable Type receives funding through Kickstarter; 350 individuals contributed more than $17,000 to get the project on the road. (See the proposed project video here.)

Touring Schedule

Moveable Type on Twitter

Power and Light Press on FaceBook

✦ Poets Ish Klein and G. Carl Purcell bring you talks about poetry, science, stories, games, and more via their No Slander Podcast.

✦ If you enjoy reading poetry online, check out Augury Books, the online publication of the New York City-based independent press of the same name. The editors offer work by both emerging and established writers. 

Augury Books on FaceBook

✦ Looking for a place other than Kickstarter to get your ideas funded? Try the online IndieGoGo. Founded in 2008 and based in the United States, IndieGoGo offers anyone with an idea the platform and integrated social media tools needed to create a fundraising campaign. To date, the site has helped launch more than 35,000 campaigns by filmmakers, writers, photographers, rock bands, community activists, environmentalists, engineers, and many others in more than 200 countries. All campaigns are contribution-based.

IndieGoGo's GoGoBlog

✦ The AllMusic Website covers all genres and styles of music, and has become one of the most comprehensive music-reference sources online. Selected "Classical", for example, and you'll find links for avant-garde, chamber, orchestral, vocal, show, and band music, as well as film, ballet, keyboard, musicals, concertos, opera, and symphony. Content ranges from biographies and reviews, to top composers, to descriptive information about instrumentation, to facts or related essays about specific albums, artists, styles, themes, and tracks. You can even explore music by continent.

Some other music sites worth exploring: Smithsonian Folkways (be sure to check out the interactive features and classroom resources), BBC Radio, Dusty Groove America, Pitchfork, the Internet Archive's Live Music Archive, UbuWeb's recently added Electronic Music Resources (focused primarily on methods and techniques, with emphasis on historical and rare material) and History of Electronic/Electroacoustic Music, 1937-2001, NetHymnal (with more than 10,000 hymns and author bios), and Hymnary, which boasts more than 1 million published hymns, scores, and media files and may be searched by text name, tune name, person (author, composer, etc.), hymnal number, topic, or scripture (see the tutorial here). The site also has an iPad app, a global hymnody map, a search graph to map the incidence of words or phrases in full hymn texts, and an interactive melody search feature that allows you to enter notes on virtual piano keys to locate the tune in your memory. Thanks to a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, Hymnary also houses the Dictionary of North American Hymnology.