Saturday, June 16, 2012

Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

Explorers and the curious will enjoy today's finds, which include the Royal Society of London's online picture library and a showcase of Greco-Roman archival materials. 

✦ The online exhibits, videos, articles, and other Web-only features of San Francisco's explOratorium museum will delight the just-plain curious and you explorer-types. 

explOratorium on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✦ Tufts University's Perseus Digital Library showcases history, literature, and culture of the Greco-Roman world. Among the online resources are primary and secondary sources for studies of ancient Greece and Rome and an Art & Archaeology Artifact Browser, primary and secondary sources in early modern English literature, humanist and Renaissance Italian poetry in Latin, Germanic materials, and Arabic-language documents

✦ The archival digital collection Who Speaks for the Negro?, related to Robert Penn Warren's 1965 book of the same title, comprises recordings of interviews and print materials including letters, periodicals, and other media; the latter appear on the Vanderbilt University site both as images of original documents and as searchable re-transcribed documents. Included are interviews with James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, Andrew Young, and many other civil rights leaders and activists discussing the civil rights movement, education, discrimination, and a wide range of related topics. The materials come from collections of original documents at the University of Kentucky and Yale University Libraries.

✦ A cautionary note should precede your first visit to the online picture library of the Royal Society of London, the world's oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. You can get caught up in the wonder there! The archive contains digital images of paintings, photographs, drawings, and prints in the Royal Society collections. Detailed descriptions and information about provenance accompany the images. A marvelous academic resource, the archive is freely available to anyone. Start out by browsing the themed galleries.

The Repository, Royal Society Blog (You'll want to follow this blog, which is full of curios.)

Royal Society on FaceBookTwitter, and YouTube

(My thanks to Paris Review Daily for the Picture Library link.)

✦ The United Kingdom's largest online bookseller, The Book Depository, has created a map that allows you to see, in real time, who is purchasing what books where in the world.

✦ My thanks for the video below go to Art Works, the NEA arts blog. Titled "Signals" (2011), the film depicts graphical clusters representing the signals exchanged among networked proteins in a cancer cell as the proteins change over time. Credit for the fascinating time-lapse video goes to Casey Reas and Ben Fry. According to the film's Vimeo page, the image has been "translated" into a mural for a building on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus.



See more from Casey Reas, an artist and professor in design media arts at UCLA, here. Reas is co-founder with Ben Fry of Processing, an open-source programming language, development environment, and online community used by artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyiss to create images, animations, and "interactions"; its objective is to promote software literacy in the visual arts. The Processing site is worth exploring.

2 comments:

Joyce Wycoff said...

love the cancer cell video. Hard to believe something so dangerous can be so lovely.

Maryellen said...

I love to explore :) the link to the book sales is too cool, and the exploratorium! I can see some adventurous surfing on the internet in my future :)