Man Hole Covers

Continuing the random series of Everyday Ephemera Digitized And Put on the Internet - see a collection of manhole covers from Japan. Just beautiful.

Everything looks better when its in a collection, no?

[link courtesy of pink tentacle - their post has many more links to image collections of manhole covers]

Never Ending Supper

So the last supper is the latest painting to be digitised at high res and made available via an online zoom/pan interface, by HAL9000. 16bn pixels in total. Doesnt bother to say what the original dimensions of the painting are, so we cant work out an equivalent dpi.

This is an interesting example of problems of currency between the way that industry talks about megapixels to describe photographic detail, whereas the library, archive, and memory institute sector are wedded to the dots per inch model: and for good reason, given that the size of artefacts various so very much, and there is no way to tell from the digital surrogate what the original dimensions are.

Still, its an interesting project. Even if they slap their logo over the image repeatedly, which as you know is one of my big bug-bears. An interesting thing to see if just how poor the condition of the original is - which is a story within itself (there is lots of information and there are lots of rants about this online).

And the language used to describe digital media still baffles me. Check out the bbc's coverage of this project. Spot the weird phrasing. In what way is a larger image "stronger" than one of a lower resolution - its not weaker or stronger, its just a different representation. And no mention of the fact that such large format works are rarely captured with one picture of a 10MP camera.
Which matters, as the bbc is a "true" source for many people out there. *sigh*.

Laser Hair... restoral?

Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa originally had eyebrows and eyelashes, a French inventor has claimed after digitally scanning the painting.

Interesting (if a little gimicky) bbc news piece about the kind of information that infrared and ultraviolet scanning can provide art historians.

What's in a name?

The British Museum have recently changed their domain name from www.british-museum.ac.uk, and www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk, to the more compact, and less academic www.britishmuseum.org. (The old URLs redirect, natch).

Hard to say what this means in the big scheme of things - but interesting to ponder nevertheless.

google article

.. from the Sunday Times, worth a look.

But as it prepares to celebrate its 10th birthday, Google has developed serious engine trouble. A series of missteps have left it facing claims that it has gone from a benign project – creating the first free, open-all-hours global library – to the information society’s most determined Big Brother. It stands accused of plotting some sinister link between its computers and us: that it wants, somehow, to plug us into its giant mainframe – as imagined in The Matrix or Terminator.

new browser

Flock aims to be the "social web browser" - integrating all that f'book, flickr, twitter activity into one handy (hyperactive?) web experience. The rhetoric is hard to follow though - I'll aim to test this later and report back.

Obituary: Roy Rosenzweig

Roy Rosenzweig, a historian and passionate advocate of the need to store digital ephemera (email, etc), recently passed away. The washington post carries an interesting overview of his life's work.