Scholars of ancient history and IT experts at Stanford University have collaborated to create a novel way to study Ancient Rome. ORBIS, a geospatial network model, allows visitors to experience the strategy behind travel in antiquity. (Find a handy tutorial for using the system on the Web and YouTube).

If you’ve never watched a documentary by Ken Burns, maybe you just haven’t had the time. Ten hours for The Civil War, eighteen and a half for Baseball, nearly nineteen for Jazz; such blocks can be difficult to carve out, even when you’re carving them out for the master audiovisual storyteller of American history.

Soon, the National Library of Ireland will re-scan, re-organize, and fully contextualize its online collection of James Joyce manuscripts. But the die-hard Joyce enthusiasts among us probably found this out in April, when what the NLI calls “The Joyce Papers, c. 1903-1928” first became available.

Viking helmets had horns, Napoleon was quite short and Lady Godiva rode through Coventry naked. Most of us accept these tales as facts because they’ve been told for many generations. But C.G.P.

What with so many open-ended internet media projects out there, I admire any that come to a close. People start plenty of things on the net that wind up petering out, but few display the conviction to work toward a decisive end.

How do you fight propaganda? With propaganda, or so held the British wartime school of thought. “Over 120 films were produced as ‘cultural propaganda’ to counteract anything the Nazis might throw out and to refute the idea that ours was a country stuck in the past.

Throughout the past two years, we’ve shown you various Walt Disney propaganda films from World War II. Now it’s time to visit a very different mid-1940s Disney production – The Story of Menstruation. From 1945 to 1951, Disney produced a series of educational films to be shown in American schools. How to bathe an infant.

Leonardo da Vinci, the archetype of the Renaissance Man, received some formal training in the anatomy of the human body. He regularly dissected human corpses and made very detailed drawings of muscles, tendons, the heart and vascular system, internal organs and the human skeleton.

Last Friday, we posted Saul Bass’ Why Man Creates. For another short film which drew Academy recognition by using animation to illuminate basic human impulses, you could do worse than Disney’s Reason and Emotion.

Maybe you already had a fascination with Saul Bass’ celebrated movie title sequences, or maybe you gained one from yesterday’s post about the current designers he’s inspired.