Tag: history

Municipal Photographer

In 1999, Michael Lorenzini, the senior photographer for the New York City Municipal Archives, was spooling through microfilm of the city’s vast Department of Bridges photography collection when he realized that many of the images shared a distinct and sophisticated aesthetic. They also had numbers scratched into the negatives. “It just kind of hit me: this is one guy; this is a great photographer”. But who was he? It took many months and uncounted hours of trolling through archives storerooms, the Social Security index, Census reports and city records on births, deaths and employment to find the answer: the photographer was Eugene de Salignac, a municipal worker who took 20K photographs of modern Manhattan in the making. “It felt like a real discovery”.

Secret Knowledge

Hockney is doing an enormous disservice to many of the artists of the past, to living artists who draw without computers, projecting or tracing, and to future artists who will believe learning to draw is unnecessary since mechanical means will be good enough.

if you ever need to troll an artist, claim that the old masters traced, not painted.

Wonders of the World

Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University. She also writes a blog called A Don’s Life, and she is the editor of an excellent new series of books, The Wonders of the World. The latter is “a small series of books that will focus on some of the world’s most famous sites or monuments.”

A few notable titles in that series include Mary Beard’s own book about The Parthenon; her collaboration with Keith Hopkins for The Colosseum; Cathy Gere’s extraordinary look at The Tomb of Agamemnon (previously discussed on BLDGBLOG here); and many others, including books about Westminster Abbey, The Temple of Jerusalem, and The Alhambra, with other titles ranging from the birth of Egyptology to the history of British railways and the First World War.

on books for the “intelligent ignorant”. the series sounds like a must-read

Should the Net forget?

The New York Times recently got some search-engine-optimization religion, and as a result its articles, including old stories from its vast archives, are now more likely to appear at or near the top of web searches. But the tactic has had an unintended consequence, writes the paper’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, in a thought-provoking article today: “Long-buried information about people that is wrong, outdated or incomplete is getting unwelcome new life. People are coming forward at the rate of 1 a day to complain that they are being embarrassed, are worried about losing or not getting jobs, or may be losing customers because of the sudden prominence of old news articles that contain errors or were never followed up.”

the notion that any “story” is ever finished is so quaint. as media gets serious about exposing their archive to search, they will have to deal with these undead stories.

Underground city

Manhattan will be gone, Los Angeles gone, Cape Canaveral flooded and covered with seaweed, London dissolving into post-Britannic muck, the Great Wall of China merely an undetectable line of minerals blowing across an abandoned landscape – but there, beneath the porous surface of Turkey, carved directly into tuff, there will still be underground cities.

truly a wonder of the world. glimpses at things like cappadocia really make you wonder what was going on in ancient times. it often feels like we got the sanitized version, the kids stuff.

Game Archaeology

Because so little primary historical work has been done on the classic text computer game “Colossal Cave Adventure”, academic and popular references to it frequently perpetuate inaccuracies. “Adventure” was the first in a series of text-based games (“interactive fiction”) that emphasize exploring, puzzles, and story, typically in a fantasy setting; these games had a significant cultural impact in the late 1970s and a significant commercial presence in the early 1980s. Will Crowther based his program on a real cave in Kentucky; Don Woods expanded this version significantly. The expanded work has been examined as an occasion for narrative encounters (Buckles 1985) and as an aesthetic masterpiece of logic and utility (Knuth 1998); however, previous attempts to assess the significance of “Adventure” remain incomplete without access to Crowther’s original source code and Crowther’s original source cave. Accordingly, this paper analyzes previously unpublished files recovered from a backup of Woods’s student account at Stanford, and documents an excursion to the real Colossal Cave in Kentucky in 2005. In addition, new interviews with Crowther, Woods, and their associates (particularly members of Crowther’s family) provide new insights on the precise nature of Woods’s significant contributions. Real locations in the cave and several artifacts (such as an iron rod and an axe head) correspond to their representation in Crowther’s version; however, by May of 1977, Woods had expanded the game to include numerous locations that he invented, along with significant technical innovations (such as scorekeeping and a player inventory). Sources that incorrectly date Crowther’s original to 1972 or 1974, or that identify it as a cartographic data file with no game or fantasy elements, are sourced thinly if at all. The new evidence establishes that Crowther wrote the game during the 1975-76 academic year and probably abandoned it in early 1976. The original game employed magic, humor, simple combat, and basic puzzles, all of which Woods greatly expanded. While Crowther remained largely faithful to the geography of the real cave, his original did introduce subtle changes to the environment in order to improve the gameplay.

digital archaeology as it were