Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

Poetry, painting, book arts, TED courses, and California are the subjects of today's finds.

✦ Anyone interested in California will find Calisphere a go-to resource for primary sources on state and local history, culture, politics, and more. Among the rewarding collections you'll find here are the letters of John Muir and the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives, which include photographs, letters and diaries, oral histories, art, and more. Calisphere comprises more than 200,000 digitized items, many of which have been organized into themed collections for use as teaching materials. Of related interest is the Online Archive of California, a free, publicly accessible resource comprising some 20,000 collection guides and more than 220,000 digital images and documents. 

✦ The Historical Book Arts Collection that is part of the digital (and primarily pictorial) collections of the University of Washington Libraries includes images of papermaking, printing, and binding, as well as illustrations from medieval manuscript collections and essays about techniques. I particularly enjoyed browsing the Decorated and Decorative Paper section of the Website.

✦ An hour-long audio documentary on painter Edward Hopper and poet Anne Sexton is available online from Third Coast Library. (My thanks to the Poetry Foundation, where I first learned about the program.)

✦ What's the latest on iTunesU? Subject-organized TEDTalks, including courses on creative problem-solving, climate change, understanding Islam, and understanding happiness. Be sure to check often as new courses come online.

✦ Though it's been around since 2008, textsound, an online audio publication is new to me and, according to the About page, images and "moving pictures" are being added to the Website. You'll find ghazals, sestinas, pantoums, and other traditional and not so traditional forms recorded by poets such as  Leslie Scalapino, Annie Finch, and Anne Waldman.

✦ Here's a soothing animated visualization by Petros Vrellis of Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night:

Starry Night (interactive animation) from Petros Vrellis on Vimeo.