Frontispiece. The works of Mr. William Shakespear in six volumes, 1709 Back in August the Folger Shakespeare Library unsealed their almost 80,000 digital image archive! An absolute treasure-trove of material related to Shakespeare, the collection contains books, theater memorabilia, manuscripts, art, and more for your online perusal. Through the Digital Image Collection, you can: Compare 19th-century productions of Shakespeare with today's through historic photographs and promptbooks Look at letters written by Queen Elizabeth I Examine rare paintings in "up close and personal" detail Read diary entries from over 200 years ago and much more I trust this won't be the last time...
Mining newspapers for poetry
What to do you get when you partner up a digital humanities projects librarian with an associate professor of computer science and engineering? Answer: Something good. At the University of Nebraska Elizabeth Lorang, research assistant professor and digital humanities projects librarian in the University Libraries has teamed with Leen-Kiat Soh, associate professor of the computer science and engineering, and a couple of students students to develop software to recognize poetry from digitized newspapers. “Millions of poems were published in newspapers. Looking at them will shift the way we understand poetry in the United States.” says Lorang. Similar to text-mining applications, where specific words and...
Kafka’s notebook, the first written evidence of Yiddish and more as Israel’s National Library opens up
13th-century German prayer book containing the earliest evidence of the Yiddish language. The goal is daunting: Undertake "a worldwide initiative to digitize every Hebrew manuscript in existence." To celebrate the project, the National Library of Israel is opening its vaults to give the world a peek and some of the jewels of their collection. The Associated Press was offered "a rare glimpse at its most prized treasures," some never before seen and others that has been locked away for years. The jewels include manuscripts by Sir Issac Newton and Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon and a Hebrew vocabuary notebook by Kafka, who took Hebrew lessons...
Scared Straight, 1990’s Style: Drug and Alcohol Posters from Uncle Sam
Here's another offering courtesy of the new partnership between the Government Printing Office (GPO) and the Digital Public Library of America. A sampling of Government issued posters from the early 1990's (and one from 1989) dealing with the dangers of drugs and alcohol. All from the vast archive of government posters that reside at the University of Iowa. Enjoy! Previously on Book Patrol: Keeping track for the National Archives and Records Adminsitration
New technology looks to uncover hidden text on map that influenced Christopher Columbus
The map is referred to as the Martellus map. It is named after its creator, the German cartographer Henricus Martellus, and is thought be have been produced in or around 1491. The only known surviving copy lives at the Beinecke Library at Yale. Being a large wall map, it is 4 by 6.5 feet, and having survived for over 500 years it is understandable that the map has seen better days. The map, which is usually on display by Beinecke’s service desk, has been relatively unexamined following a peak in interest after its acquisition in the 1960s because it is largely illegible. Now thanks to a new...