Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

If you've come in from the cold but still have energy to expend, head over to New York Bound Books to browse selections relating to New York, test your mission-oriented game skills with Pheon, a multi-media alternate-reality game, try your hand at text-analysis at WordSeer, listen to PennSound Radio, or watch a visualization of the Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1. Then go download a poetry app. 

✦ New York Bound Books — "All Things New York for Readers and Writers" — is reincarnated as a Website. Don't pass up the opportunity to browse its wonderful resources!

Clyde Haberman, "A New York-Centric Bookstore Is Reborn, in Pixels", The New York Times, December 14, 2011

✦ The Smithsonian's The Bigger Picture blog is one of my favorites, often offering links that send me exploring. A link in one recent post took me to WordSeer, an evolving text-analysis tool that produces visualizations of texts' grammatical structures. A current project is looking for language-use patterns in American slave narratives; an earlier one used WordSeer to compare use of the word "love" in Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies. Also see "Search Shakespeare's Works". See other earlier WordSeer projects here. Visualizations using The New York Times to look at tagging, articles mentioning "riots", and so on are shown here.

5-Minute Interview about WordSeer with Aditi Muralidharan

Text Mining and the Digital Humanities, Blog of Aditi Muralidharan

✦ PennSound Radio, a 24-hour stream of readings and conversations from PennSound's poetry archive, launched in mid-December 2011. The daily lineup includes rebroadcasts of a number of series, among them Live at the Writers House and Close Listening by Charles Bernstein, plus favorite performances. To access, use iTunes or the TuneIn app for iPhone, Blackberry, or Android.

PennSound Radio on Twitter

PennSound Daily

✦ Looking for poetry apps? Go here, where you'll find some of the best, from a free Poetry Daily app to satisfy your poem-a-day habit, to iPoetry, which allows you to see poetry performed, to AudioNote that can be synched to your typing, to Glossary of Poetry Terminology. AudioNote, at $4.99, is the most expensive app but most are just $0.99 or free. (My thanks to the Poetry Foundation for the link to Apps for Poets.)

✦ If you enjoy playing alternate reality games online, try Pheon at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It's a variation on "Capture the Flag". As explained here, players align with one of two groups, then compete to complete various missions in which SAAM's art collections, exhibitions, and programs feature. The objective is to obtain the pheon, a talisman that will restore balance to the virtual world of Terra Tectus.

Pheon on FaceBook (An app is available to play the game on FaceBook.)

✦ Brooklynite Alexander Chen, who spends his days at Google Creative Lab, has created a visualization of the first Prelude from Bach's Cello Suites No. 1. An interactive version will test your musical skills at an elementary level.

Baroque.me: J.S. Bach - Cello Suite No. 1 - Prelude from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

Bach at Classical Archives

Video of Cello Suite No. 1 - Prelude (Another Version as Played by Rostropovich)

Project Summary

Alexander Chen on Twitter and Google+

My thanks to PBS News Hour Art Beat for the link to Flowing Data, where this video was posted. Also see Chen's Conductor at this Writing Without Paper post.