Saturday, November 24, 2012

Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

If you refrained from feasting on stuffing and turkey and apple pie, today's edition of Saturday Sharing offers you several additional courses, starting off with Baking for Good, where you can turn photos into edible treats. If you're more inclined to sit back and be awed, check out Andre Ermolaev's images of Iceland, the 13th Century church that's now a bookstore, and the new visualization lab at Brown University. If you have any energy left, file an answer to OED Appeals.

✦ Eat your memories! At the online Baking for Good, you can get your photos (up to six per batch) turned into "Snapshot Cookies". Fifteen percent of the net proceeds from every purchase is donated to a cause of your choice. What's better than being charitable while you're enjoying a treat? (My thanks to TED blog for the link.)

✦ Here's an example of creative thinking and reuse: a 13th Century church in the Netherlands is transformed into an 8,000-square-foot bookstore.

✦ These aerial photographs of Iceland by Russian Andre Ermolaev are stunning. See more images here.

✦ In October, Oxford English Dictionary launched OED Appeals, a virtual community space dedicated to collaboration with the public to help OED editors "unearth new information about the history and usage of English." (This blog announcement offers details.) Calls have gone out for help with such phrases as "in your dreams", "to come in from the cold", and "blue-arsed fly" and the words "cooties" and "disco".  I can't wait to read the answers.

Oxford University Press on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✦ I had a wonderful secondary education but technological resources like the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab at Brown University didn't exist in my day. The lab offers a surround-sound system and a wall of a dozen 55-inch high-resolution LED screens that make possible interdisciplinary visualization projects and collaborative display and interaction. Also, the university library has launched Curio, a new blog devoted to artifacts valued for their oddness or rarity. It's a delight for the curious among us. (My thanks to The Bigger Picture blog for the link to Curio.)

✦ There are all kinds of ways to get your message out into the world. Artist ETMCA of Los Angeles has the taken the more unusual route of painting a coded poem, "The Ones" (video), then cutting it up (it's spread across 10 canvases) and hiding the fragments in used bookstores around the city. More of the artist's "discovery" projects are here and here. (My thanks to MediaBistro and Page Turner, where I first saw the links to ETMCA's work.)

2 comments:

Louise Gallagher said...

I love the cookies idea!

Thanks so much for always sharing the wonders you find.

Kathleen Overby said...

The bookstore church is awesome. Word becomes flesh.