This is huge, or potentially so. Yahoo! has launched what they are calling an “electronic anthropology project”—a digital time capsule of images, stories, video, audio, and artwork, all submitted by Yahoo! users. As of this posting, the project has collected more than 4000 objects from nearly 3000 people in just over a day. When the capsule closes on November 8th, the collection will be transfered for long term preservation with the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings project. Until then you can explore it through a very cool Flash interface. By any measure this a very welcome expansion of the practice of online collecting … even if Yahoo!’s claim that “this is the first time that digital data will be gathered and preserved for historical purposes” is patently and outrageously false.
Category Archives: Tools
CoverPop
If you ever have eight or ten hours to kill, check out CoverPop.com, a new mashup site and a goldmine of found history. According to the site’s operators,
Each coverpop is an interactive mosaic, made of tiny images, such as magazine covers. These are called “micro thumbnails”. As you drag the mouse over each micro thumbnail, it pops up to a full-sized thumbnail image, and provides some information about the item. For some coverpops, you can click again to produce either a full-sized image, or to go to another website to learn more information about the item.
Each time you arrive at the site or click on “more coverpops” at the top right corner of the screen, CoverPop will present you with a new, randomly selected mosaic. For example, when I first arrived I was shown CoverPop’s collection of “a few thousand science fiction magazines”.
Other historical collections include vintage pulp fiction covers, Mad magazines, old cereal boxes, and (remarkably) engravings from the works of 17th Century Jesuit practical mathematician and natural philosopher Athanasius Kircher.
