Early Computers

Sometimes, buried under the avalanche of pop culture and political news, the BBC news website comes up with little gems of videos which are worth checking out.

Here is a video in which Jeffrey Katz from California's Computer History Museum takes a tour of computers through the decades - such as the Eniac, early punchcards, early IBM computers, etc. Worth 5 mins of your internet addicted time.

[link]

Just 5 more minutes pleeeeeeeeeeeeease

Interesting article in the NY times about a boot camp in Korea to cure obsession with the web.

But these young people are not battling alcohol or drugs. Rather, they have severe cases of what many in this country believe is a new and potentially deadly addiction: cyberspace.

They come here, to the Jump Up Internet Rescue School, the first camp of its kind in South Korea and possibly the world, to be cured.

[link]

Multi-lingual image searching

I'm a sucker for google image search, and searching tags on flickr. Its very handy for illustrating lectures (although I do credit images and just try to use those in the public domain, naturally). However, I've been aware for a while that I was only searching the English web - which is rapidly becoming a less significant place to start looking.

Pan Images is a prototype image searcher which uses automatic query translation to search both flickr and google, returning searches in hundreds of different languages including Dutch, Hindi, Polish, Russian.... etc etc etc. The web is much bigger again. My lectures are full of interesting slides. Peace is restored to the Kingdom.

VERA is still passive

Do you remember this post about a great passive aggressive note found at the Silchester dig, which someone submitted to passive aggressive notes.com?

Well, today, we made it into the Guardian. The print copy also contains the photo.

Evidence for this unlikely renaissance is readily available at passiveaggressivenotes.com, an online clearing house that allows sarky notes from employers, flatmates, landlords and strangers to be posted anonymously so that all the world can speculate about the wellsprings of pent-up anger motivating their various authors. "Ben - I have a concern about the removal of your futon," begins one effort, sent in by Ben, who found it stuck to his futon when he went to remove it.Other examples of the genre include one from an archaeological site in Silchester, Hampshire ("Missing: 33 pencils, 39 erasers. Search your pockets, search your tent, search your conscience"),

TEI@20 meeting

I'm washington at the moment, in the TEI@20 conference. Actually, I'm writing this at the back of the lecture room, with one ear cocked to a panel session about funding for digital humanities.

I gave a plenary paper this morning about TEI by Example, which I think went down ok (phew).

One of the things which came out of the comments and questions is the importance of producing introductory materials which show *why* you would bother with this whole TEI markup malarky - getting across a few examples not only of markup but of what you can do once you have marked something up. For those learning TEI, grasping this can really suck people in. My students eye's light up when the penny drops about *why* you go to all this bother, and see the type of transformations and analysis that TEI encoding affords.

Which is something we at TEI by Example must address. hmmmm.

anonymity on the net

Interesting comments by Ben Macintyre, from the Times.

Anonymity is also one of the defining features of public discourse in the internet age: of the millions of people posting comments on blogs, discussion boards and in other forums, most choose not to identify themselves, but prefer to opinionate under a pseudonym. The cloak of privacy is what gives much internet discussion its raw energy, with a great cacophony of unidentifiable voices competing on equal terms. But unnamed writing is also responsible for some of the worst internet vices: intemperate “flaming” of opponents, bullying, dishonesty and a general coarsening of language and incivility. Not to mention self-congratulation and score-settling.

[link]

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]