Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Newspapers, by Quinn Cowper, Creative Commons: BY-NC-ND 2.0."][/caption] On May 20th, a flurry of reports took note of Google’s decisions to halt its ambitious efforts to digitize the contents of newspaper archives and make them online and at no cost.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="296" caption="This image from Mercury mission number four taken on Sept. 13, 1961 is just one of the many images that was written on by engineers. Credit: NASA/JSC/Arizona State University."][/caption] On May 16th, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the vicinity of Cape Canaveral to watch the Endeavor, the NASA space shuttle,
Description: When institutions archive data, they capture and organize it in digital formats that make the most sense to them, based upon their specific group of users, needs, and technical options that are available at a given point in time. But what happens if, for example, institutions decide that it makes sense to enhance their mission by their presenting data collections in less
Description: Since The Bigger Picture began in early 2009, I’ve written a number of posts about what might be called camera traps, situations where cameras are installed to collect evidence of one kind of unusual or unwanted behavior or another. Red light cameras are a controversial example; across the country and on an almost daily basis, local municipalities and motorists argue about
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Salman Rushdie's archives, featured in an Emory University publication, by Georgia Popplewell, Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic."][/caption] Back in October I talked—with great interest and at length—with Anne Van Camp, director of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, about the various
Description: Savage Beauty, the posthumous and retrospective exhibition of women’s fashions designed by Alexander McQueen (1969–2010) at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art closed early in August. The record breaking event—an official attendance count of 661,509 visitors made it the eighth biggest show in the museum’s history—featured approximately one hundred ensembles drawn, primarily,
Description: [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="I have no hours in the day to watch TV/games. Don't let life go by!!, by National Media Museum, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] From 2002-2005, a unique archive of video tapes was compiled by the Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) at UCLA, with the goal of studying a relatively new social
Description: [caption id="attachment_2474" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Silicon Eye, from the inner core.... the 5 Megapixel CCD sensor that electronically captures the image, by Flickr user jurvetson."][/caption] The Nobel Prize jury recently announced three winners in physics, who’ve been dubbed "the masters of light" for their innovations in the ways photographic images are
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="385" caption="Games, by Axel Tregoning, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] While some people seem to enjoy fantasizing about doomsday scenarios and the end of the “real” world, a recent piece on Ars Tehchnica’s website makes it clear that virtual worlds don’t last forever, either.