![]() ![]() Those zones that were identified as Times articles were then linked to metadata from the existing Times Index-and scanned into electronic text, making the archives largely searchable. This complicates thing because each page has to be individually analyzed and partitioned into zones of related text. However, unlike books, newspapers are not single columns of text. Much like book digitization, the first step of this process was scanning each page from the source material. The Times had already published a complete index of all its articles since 1913, but it wanted the full text of its archives to be digitized and searchable. Way back in 2001, the New York Times hired ProQuest to digitize the vast majority of its archives-dating from the paper’s founding in 1851 to 1980, when the Times started keeping electronic copies of article text. It’s fun to explore this way, clicking through the past, one ad at a time. This is the story of how I ended up captivated by a chance encounter with a 135-year-old newspaper advertisement-and how the random face staring back at me from the archives would reveal the surprising origins of ASCII art, a graphic design technique that’s usually associated with 20th-century computer art. On any day, such vignettes sometimes become rabbit holes to the past. On the same day the Titanic sank, there was also coverage of a gun battle in Greenwich Village, and a passenger lost in a runaway balloon. You might start by visiting a historic event-say, coverage of the Titanic sinking-but the real fun is wandering off the beaten path and exploring all the other news of the day. The site delivers the reader directly to the past, making you feel like a cross between a tourist and an archaeologist. My personal favorite however is TimesMachine, a site available to all New York Times subscribers that lets readers virtually flip through any historical issue of The New York Times all the way up through 2002. Project Gutenberg continues to add new public-domain books to its collection every day, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has posted thousands of images online with metadata as part of its Open Access for Scholarly Collections initiative. ![]() Wikipedia has its own Wikimedia Commons, to which anybody can upload images and videos. Chronicling America is a searchable repository of newspapers published between 18 from the Library of Congress, which is also one of the many institutions in the Flickr Commons public image archive. The New York Public Library, for instance, has historic menus and interactive floor plans. Every day, more libraries and archives are pushing pieces of their collections online in easily browsable interfaces. `"-._'-._'-.'-.One of the joys of modern technology is how easy it is to immerse yourself in the past. Hjw - hayley jane wakenshaw _ Who said frogs don't sleep? I use the first of the Small Frogs in my email signature. You can copy them and display them in any text, use Courier New as the font if the spacing doesnt look quite right in your copies. Below are a bunch of ASCII Art frog drawings.ĪSCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" It is a world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. ![]()
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